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WHERE LIFE
BETTER

AN UNSENTIMENTAL
AMERICAN JOURNEY
 Also by

JAMES RORTY

OUR MASTER'S VOICE ADVERTISING

CHILDREN OF THE SUN

WHAT MICHAEL SAID

TO THE
CENSUS TAKER
WHERE LIFE
IS BETTER
AN UNSENTIMENTAL
AMERICAN JOURNEY

BY JAMES RORTY

a JOHN DAY book

REYNAL & HITCHCOCK

NEW YORK.
 COPYRIGHT, 1936, BY JAMES RORTY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, including

the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.

Published by

JOHN DAY
in association with

REYNAL & HITCHCOCK

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BY QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC., RAHWAY, NEW JERSEY
 CONTENTS

Introduction
PREFACE 9
1. MERRY-GO-ROUND 15
2. STARTING WEST FROM E ASTON 33
3. I HURRIED Too MUCH 51

Labor and the Temper of the Unemployed

4. No TRUCE ON THE COAL AND STEEL FRONT 61

5. AMERICA'S FIFTH ESTATE: THE UNEMPLOYED 72

6. THE FIFTH ESTATE IN ACTION 80

7. YOWZIR: AN EPISODE go

Detroit and Chicago

8. DETROIT: THE CAPITAL OF MOBILIA 101

9. SCHEHERAZADE SWEENEY AND

THE AMBASSADOR 109
10. CHICAGO SKY RIDE 122
11. CENTURY OF PROGRESS 137

What Time Is It in the North-Central Farm-Belt?

12. WISCONSIN: A PROBLEM COUNTY 151

13. A CENTURY OF EVASION 157

14. How RADICAL ARE THE FARMERS? 171
5
6 CONTENTS
15. THE TERRIBLE SWEDE 182
16. PUSHING THE MINUTE HAND 189
17. THE HOUR HAND AND "PLANNING" 198

When the Rains Fail

18. DROUGHT AND "PLANNING" 211

19. RUGGED INDIVIDUALS, DROUGHT, AND DAMS 216

20. DROUGHT AND DEMAGOGY 224
21. THE EXILES OF FORT PECK 232
22. THE GHOST IN THE COULEE 242
23. SIGNS AND PORTENTS 261

California, Where Life Is Better

24. WHERE LIFE Is BETTER 269

25. DREAM FACTORY 286
26. NOT GREEK, BUT ROMAN 305
27. WELCOME TO EL CENTRO 309
28. BREAD-AND-BUTTER LETTER 316

Heading Home
29. CALLIE LONG'S BOY HUEY 335
30. ALL QUIET ON THE SOUTHERN FRONT 357
31. TVA: THE PRESIDENT'S LOVE CHILD 365
32. WHAT TIME Is IT? 379

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 384
INTRODUCTION
 PREFACE

people who will most clearly perceive, but also,

THE hope, most generously forgive the limitations of this

I

book are the people who helped me to write it. They are
the dozens and scores of
newspapermen, public officials,
teachers, labor organizers, and miscellaneous casual ac-
quaintances whom I met on a seven months' automobile
trip, covering about fifteen thousand miles, across the con-
tinent and back.
To most of them I was almost or wholly unknown.
When I told them that I would be able to spend four
days, perhaps a week in that community, they shrugged.
Mine was a fantastic enterprise. It would take at least
four months, they assured me, to obtain an approximate
understanding of that one community. After which they
proceeded, with a generosity for which I cannot be too
grateful, to give me much more of their time than they
could afford; to give me the benefit of their own informed
expertness which in most cases I must keep anonymous
because they were often talking off the record. Newspaper-
men, especially, know infinitely more than they can print.
What these people will look for in this book and what
I
hope they will find is an attempt to isolate and describe
significant phenomena and trends; an attempt to evoke
and make understandable the tensions, the confusions, the
"feel" of the country as a whole; to exhibit not so much

9
10 INTRODUCTION
the statistics as the people whose current dilemmas the
statistics fail adequately to express.
Thepoint of view of the writer is frankly radical curi-
ously, the people I talked to did not seem to mind this
particularly, not even Chamber of Commerce secretaries
and business men. Much more than I had
expected, I en-
countered all along the route an impressive residue of the
earlierAmerican hardihood which Thomas Jefferson ex-
pressed when he said that America would need a revolu-
tion at least every twenty years. These people were not
afraid to contemplate radical change, nor even, many of
them, to participate in the making of change. But all of
them without exception were dismayed by the paradoxes
of the American situation: our magnificently developed
twentieth-century technical productivity and our nine-
teenth-century pioneer-trader economic and social con-
cepts; the profit-motivated technological and financial ad-
venturousness of our gambler-entrepreneurs and their eco-
nomic and political conservatism, equally profit-motivated
and enforced by an acute realization of the intolerable
fragility of the productive-distributive apparatus; the ob-
stinate hangover of the democratic dogma and illusion
and the obvious facts of class stratification and class rule;
the technical perfection of our instruments of social com-
munication and their social misuse, disuse, and frustration.
Somewhere in one of the drought areas of northeastern
Montana I wrote in one of my thirty notebooks: "The
country too big. It is too big to report, and partly be-
is

cause it is too big to report, it is, possibly, too big to

govern."
Elsewhere I indicate another possibility: that the coun-
 PREFACE 11

try too small, that within the limits of our current social
is

consciousness, the cure, or rather the palliative of our

intolerable size will be still more size; in short, imperial

conquest, as a means of temporarily resolving some of the

contradictions above listed.
The factor of pace is also important of course; indeed
it is probably determining. We have no time to mature
and disseminate workable social and economic concepts;
we have no time to patch and rehabilitate our dilapidated
democratic institutions; we have no time to develop a
revolutionary movement sufficiently powerful and respon-
sible to take and hold power when and if the opportunity
is given. It was this realization which most dismayed the

more liberal and informed people to whom I talked.

I say that I was cordially received and generously

treated. There were exceptions, of course; a misunder-

standing with the Sheriff of Imperial County, California,

which resulted in my spending a night in the county jail
at El Centre; a theological difference with a preacher in
Marked Tree, Arkansas, which occasioned my rather pre-
from that community. But in general I have
cipitate exit
much reason for gratitude and little for complaint.
In certain chapters I have resorted to the greater con-
creteness and enlarged perspective of the fictional and
poetic forms, chiefly as a practical means of handling dif-
ficult material. I have tried to make these experiments re-
inforce rather than break the narrative and expository
sequence, and to fuse the journalistic material into a
rough synthesis.
Perhaps the title of this book requires a word of ex-

planation. It is borrowed from a booklet I wrote ten

12 INTRODUCTION

years ago for Californians, Inc., entitled "California,

Where Life Is Better." The booklet was widely distrib-
utedI am told that the successive editions totalled nearly
a million copies. Although the writing of the booklet was
a commercial assignment, it was written with a certain
sincere enthusiasm. Life, I thought, was better in the
California of that period in a number of respects. The
climate was milder; the slums of the cities were less sor-
did; fresh vegetables and flowers were plentiful and cheap
at all seasons of the year; the landscape of magnificent
mountain ranges and great golden valleys was intoxicating
to me then, and is still. Moreover, in that earlier time
the social stratifications, despite the maturing racial and
class conflicts, had not yet hardened and crystallized. In
San Francisco, particularly, I had encountered and was
grateful for a genuine spirit of tolerance and generosity
which extended to all classes. The treasures of nature
had not been wholly appropriated, so men and women
could afford to be a little generous to one another.
In that "boost" pamphlet I could write with a good
conscience many true words of praise. I could not and
did not write all the truth, it being the nature of adver-
tising to exhibit half-truths only, in the service of its spe-
cial pleading for commercial causes.
In my chapters dealing with California, I have striven
to be neither pessimistic nor unfair. But life is not better
there now. When I left in 1924, after spending four years
in San Francisco, I thought California soft, sentimental,
naively brutal and greedy in its
spirit of pioneer boosting
and grabbing, but not vicious. I returned to find the mold
hardened by conflict and fear. California was already
 PREFACE 13

building the stockades of fascism with which to protect

what was left of its grandiose acquisitive dream. But the
same Rotarian rhetoric, the same advertising casuistry
were still current, there as elsewhere, all across the conti-
nent. Business would "pick up." Life would be better

just over some nearing horizon of space or time not

dif-

ferent, but "better." With few exceptions the hitch-hikers

I picked up along the road shared this day dream equally
with the secretaries of the local Chambers of Commerce,
although in other respects they were less fortunate.
I encountered nothing in 15,000 miles of travel that
disgusted and appalled me so much as this American ad-
diction to makebelieve. Apparently, not even empty
bellies can cure it. Of all the facts I dug up, none seemed
so significant or so dangerous as the overwhelming fact of
our lazy, irresponsible, adolescent inability to face the
truth or tell it.
If we, as a people, are to go down helplessly in a fatuous
and seemingly unnecessary chaos, it will be this where-
life-is-better day dream that ensnared and tripped us. For
the masses of the population life is not better here, there,
or anywhere across the continent. Nor will it be really
better tomorrow, despite the half-baked and contradictory
indices of "recovery" which at this writing have given Mr.
Roosevelt his longed-for "breathing-spell." Within the
framework of the present social order there is no escape
either in space or time for the great masses of American
citizens. As for the New Deal ephemerae I set out to chase,

they are a part of the dream; the fervor of fake "reform"

is almost an index of the disintegration of the system.

The New Deal has cured nothing and worsened much.

14 INTRODUCTION
It ishard for me to understand how any journalist, travel-
ing across the continent with his eye on the facts, could

bring back a different report. Yet I know that other re-

ports will be rendered, contradicting mine, and bolstering
optimism with evidence of a sort. The dream must be
served.
Too late, I realise that in hoping to make any dent
whatever upon cloud bank of illusion, I open myself
this
to the charge of being sentimental. So that mine was per-

haps not an unsentimental journey after all. But let it pass.

Time is not sentimental, and time hurries so fast. I am
sure that time will correct soon enough both my own senti-
mentalities and those which I attack.
 MERRY-GO-ROUND

circle and soar over the middle-western and

HAWKS western plains today as in earlier days. They are
the descendants of the hawks that watched the slow trek
of the covered wagons fifty, a hundred years ago, and the
human beings moving today over the only slightly altered
landscape are, many of them, the descendants of the cov-
ered wagon and later pioneers. The hawks have not
changed, the stare of their yellow eyes is anciently simple
and predatory, their motions in the air are the same.
The human beings, too, have not changed biologically.
But their motions and their means of motion have changed
greatly. Whereas in the earlier time the prevailing motion
was a slow, irresistible drift from east to west, now the
movement is
rapid, accelerative, and circular, almost cen-
trifugal.
People in automobiles are racing over the highways:
allkinds of people, going in every direction, for all kinds
of reasons and for no reason at all. Traveling salesmen

representing eastern factories, intent upon selling their

goods in western towns which also have factories making
similar goods, and which also send out salesmen traveling
in the opposite direction. Government
representatives
solemnly concerned with seeing that factory A observes the
same "fair practices" as factory B. Farmers moving east,
15
16 INTRODUCTION
farmers moving west. City people moving to the country
where there is more food; farmers who have lost their
farms moving to the cities where there is more relief.
Farmers planting grain; farmers plowing grain under.
Dairymen trucking their milk to the cities; Farm Holiday
posses racing their cars to head off the trucks and spill the
milk on the highway. Corn-hog farmers breeding pigs; gov-
ernment crews slaughtering the pigs and the pregnant sows
and piling the carcasses in ditches. (The hawks circle lower
and are joined by vultures; this is indeed something new.)
Organizers of all kinds course over the roads: New Deal
organizers, Townsend Plan organizers, Share-the-Wealth
organizers, Liberty League organizers, A. F. of L. organ-

izers, Communist organizers; also thousands of unorgan-

ized men, women and children thumb the passing cars
going east, west, north, and south, going nowhere in par-
ticular, for no particular reason. The wind rises, and sud-

denly all movement stops; the surface of the land rises,

and clouds of dust darken the sun. The people cower in

their automobiles; the roadside ditches are drifted level
with the concrete; in cities many hundreds of miles away

apartment dwellers shut their windows and brush the de-

stroyed fertility of Kansas cornfields from their counter-
panes.(The hawks soar higher with bleak cries; this too is
something new there were no such dust storms in the
earlier time before the gang plows raped the buffalo sod.)
For seven months I drove an automobile over this land-
scape, and now I have to justify some fifteen thousand
miles of travel. People ask me: What did you see? What
did you learn? What is happening to America, and what
is going to happen? I tend to balk at these questions. The
 MERRY-GO-ROUND 17

landscape is so huge; the forces so complex. How should

I know, or venture to speak with much greater assurance

than any other of those bewildered ants I passed on the

road?
In Carmel, California, talked to a poet who has trav-
I

eled very little in recent years, but has thought a great

deal. He doesn't know either, but he has had moments of
profound intuition and prescience. In 1929 Jeffers pub-
lished a poem entitled "The Broken Balance," from which
the following is
quoted:

The people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking

in the archways,
Were all suddenly struck
quiet
And ran from under stone to look up at the sky: so shrill and
mournful,
So fierce and final, a brazen
Pealing of trumpets high up in the air, in the summer blue
over Tuscany.
They marveled; the soothsayers answered:
"Although the Gods are little troubled toward men, at the
end of each period
A sign is declared in heaven
Indicating new times, new customs, a changed people; the
Romans Rule, and Etruria is finished;
A wise mariner will trim his sails to the wind."

I heard yesterday
So and mournful a trumpet-blast,
shrill
It was hard to be wise. You must eat change and endure;
. . .

not be much troubled

For the people; they will have their
happiness.
i8 INTRODUCTION
When the republic grows too heavy to endure, then Caesar
will carry it;

When life grows hateful, there's power.

Not having given my heart to the hawks, I cannot learn

either to hate life or to love power, on the terms that

power ordinarily exacts from her lovers. Once, I confess,

in the middle of the Montana desert, I had a moment of
sheer panic. I had a sudden impulse to move my family
to some tropical island, relatively uncontaminated by
civilization, and there spin out the residue of my biological
span; an impulse to escape, to commit social suicide.
The impulse passed, as did similar impulses I remem-
bered having had during the War and after the War;
psychological strains and crises which were vaguely diag-
nosed as "shell-shock": the proper penalty which I paid,
I remember one physician telling me, for not having be-

lieved in the War, for permitting myself to hate its unctu-

ous irrationality, its idiotic sentimentalities and hatreds,
its meaningless violence and cruelty.
But America was not at war. Why should I have experi-
enced again the war frisson? People ask me what is going
to happen America and I reply: I don't know. But this
to
I do know: that all over America I smelled the war smell,

that on the clearest days I saw people moving in a mist

of fear and hatred. . . .

In Louisiana I saw the man who, but for his assassina-

tion just as this book was going to press, might one day
have become Jeffers' American Caesar. He was full of fear
and hatred; morally, an infantile monster, with extraor-
 MERRY-GO-ROUND ig

dinary abilities and a prodigious lust for power. I probed

into his background and found the backwoods of northern

Louisiana reeking with the hatreds of generations of
still

half-starved and rebellious hill-billies, dating from before

the Civil War. Will Huey Long have comparable suc-
cessors in Louisiana and elsewhere? I am convinced that
he will.

Driving north through the Yazoo delta, I picked up a

mulatto who was returning to the small farm he had
inherited from his father. We passed through a trading
village,and he said: "This is the town where my father
was killed." I said: "Why was he killed?" He replied: "I
don't know." I said: "Who killed him?" He replied: "I
don't know." I stared at the yellow mask beside me. "You
know," I said. "You don't need to be afraid to tell me."
He peered at me cautiously. "My father," he said, "was
well-to-do. He owned three hundred acres of land. He had
money in the bank. He had twenty-one children and sent
half of them to college."
I said: "Was he was killed?" "I think so," he
that why

replied. "Do you know who killed him?" I asked. He

looked at me and was silent. "Was the man who killed
him ever caught, tried, and convicted?" "No." "How do
you feel about that?" He edged away from me suspiciously,
and for twenty miles sat silent while we drove across the
endless checkerboard of the cotton fields, the men and
mules plowing, the women and children either fishing
along the roadside ditches or sitting on the porches of
their two- and three-room unpainted shacks mill village
shacks or worse, set down
at regular intervals among the
fields, without a tree or a shrub to palliate their ugliness.
2O INTRODUCTION
"In that town over there," my companion broke the
silence, "they shot a preacher a while back." "A Negro
preacher?" "Yes." "Was he organizing share-croppers?"
He looked at me. "The plantation owner said: 'The nigger
'
is my shade in summer and my fire in winter/
"They're
not "No." "Did you go to college?" "Yes."
all like that."

"The share-croppers need leaders, don't they?" "I've got

my mother, my wife and two babies. We can just get by."
Soon after that he got out at a cross-roads. I didn't ask
his name. I am sure he wouldn't have given it to me. . . .

In Marked Tree, Arkansas, I talked to a white preacher,

pastor of the leading Protestant church of the community.

I asked him about the charges of the Southern Tenant

Farmers Union that twenty-three acts of violence had

been committed by planters, riding bosses and deputy
sheriffs against white and black members of the union.
I intimated that, as an exponent of the Christian way of

life, he must be concerned about outbreaks of violence

among his parishioners. He glared at me. He said that

he knew of no acts of violence. I offered evidence, and he
qualified this. There was no trouble now. But if any more
newspapermen from the North stuck their noses into
Poinsett County, there would be trouble. I resented the

implied threat and he became more specific. If I wanted

trouble right now, I could have it.
I drove out of Marked Tree with the glare of a medieval

inquisitor boring into my back. It might have been the

muzzle of a shot-gun. If I had stayed to argue, however
gently, I think it would have been. . . .

In the jail at El Centre, California, the same sort of

 MERRY-GO-ROUND 551

eyes stared at me through a peep-hole cut in a partition

the eyes of Imperial County's version of "law and order,"
in the heads of an assortment of plain-clothes detectives
and stool pigeons, for whose benefit I was put through
the "show-up." A
few hours before I had seen some of
the rat faces that went with those rat-eyes, when a dozen
deputy and stool pigeons questioned me and
sheriffs

searched me and my car for evidence that I, a reporter

with full credentials from capitalist newspapers including
an identification photograph, was engaged in "commu-
nistic activities." They were not pleasant faces. Those of
the petty offenders lodged in my jail block were better,
finer, gentler; even the pale, curiously aristocratic face of
the border gambler he had once been a railroad switch-
manwho twice intervened to quiet the nerves of quar-

reling prisoners. When I suggested that his trade was

merely taking money from suckers who could spare it, he
said firmly: "Any kind of sucker. If a sucker can be taken,
I take him. . . ."

The thread of violence runs through all these episodes:

the violence of owners, of bosses, under the camouflage
of "law and order"; the violence of planters using the
church as its tool, race prejudice as its smoke screen.
How can I, who remember so well the violence, the irra-

tionality, the coordinate and collusive sentimentality of

the War, put my trust in this violence or any of its agents?
I don't. Not even in the class struggle, conceived of as
an inevitable process issuing ultimately in freedom, justice,
the cooperative commonwealth, the classless society. The
class struggle is not beyond good and evil any more than
22 INTRODUCTION
is any other kind of struggle. And the final conflict, if there
is to be a final conflict, which I doubt, will be not between

class and class, but between intelligence and stupidity,

between sanity and fanaticism, between justice and in-
justice, between freedom and tyranny.
The above reflection, copied from one of my notebooks,
indicates the extent to which the trip shattered some of

my initial assurances and intensified my doubts. A land-

scape, I learned, is always bigger than it looks on the

map;
and the destiny of America, I came to suspect, is more
complex and less certain than it looks in the official Com-
munist blue-prints. Americans have always been a violent
people: physically and emotionally violent and mentally
soft and lazy. If the pioneers were brutal and sentimental

enough in all conscience when they had plenty of Indians

to rob and kill, forests to devastate, and soil to maltreat,
will they not be twice as brutal, twice as sentimental, now
that the Indians are on reservations, the forests turned
into pulp magazines, and soil eroded by water and wind,
so that they have only each other on whom to wreak their

hairy-chested stupidities? What will happen now that the

last frontier is closed, now that cable conveyors drop con-

crete into the streams where only the beavers built dams
fiftyyears ago, now who conquered the
that the trapper
wilderness so violentlyis himself
trapped in a new strange
wilderness which he does not understand, even though it
was he who created it?
and emotionally violent, mentally soft and
Physically
seemed to me that five years of depression have had
lazy. It
made this characterization of the American temperament
little less accurate.
 MERRY-GO-ROUND 23

One of the questions asked is: What percentage of

I am
the American population has grasped the central dilemma
of our time and country, namely, the failure of the capital-
ist mode of production for profit to finance consumption
or to make possible a world at peace?
I asked the same question myself all across the continent
and back, and many of the people I interviewed were in a

position to estimate their own regions at least. By collating

their guesses with my own observations I arrived at a

rough estimate: that ninety-five out of a hundred Ameri-

cans have not grasped this dilemma, whether stated in
Marxian, technocratic, Utopian, Epic, cooperative, or any
other terms. In other words, not more than 5 per cent
of the population have begun to think at all, and these

belong to a special category of liberal and radical sophisti-

cation. are class-conscious or at least politically and
They
socially conscious workers, teachers, preachers, labor
or-

ganizers, doctors, social workers, writers, artists, labor

lawyers, a few architects, engineers, technicians, and a very

few business men.
Another question that my liberal friends asked me on
my return was: "Are not businessmen generally beginning
to grasp this central dilemma?" On the contrary, it struck
me that businessmen as a whole are no more informed
and considerably less liberal than they were during the
New Era. Take San Francisco after the ordeal of the gen-
eral strike. Having once lived there, I had many liberal
friends and acquaintances in business and in close touch
with business leaders. I asked them: "How many San
Francisco business leaders know what has happened to the
country and why?" There were various estimates. The
24 INTRODUCTION

highest was six. "You see," explained the shrewdest of my

informants, "so many of them are only a few jumps ahead
of the sheriff. They have
keep their noses close to their
to
own ledgers; they have technological changes to worry
about, tariff worries, code worries, labor worries. It is true
that even to run their own businesses efficiently they really

ought to read a little Marx. But today they have less and
less time to read anything. They work harder, fight harder,

and less and less intelligently."

More and more, noted, business is turning to ex-

I

teachers and ex-newspapermen for counsel and guidance

which, incidentally, they rarely follow, this being the his-

toric experience of courtiers and philosophers-in-waiting.

I had dinner with one of these, who had perforce played

a rather uncomfortable and unedifying role in the general

strike. Months afterward his conscience still troubled him
and he had taken refuge in history and philosophy. In
lieu of answering some of my questions, he showed me the

following quotation from Guglielmo Ferrero's The

Women of the Ccesars:

For few episodes in general history impress so powerfully

upon the mind the fact that the progress of the world is one
of the most tragic of its phenomena. Especially is such knowl-

edge necessary to the favored generations of prosperous and

easy times. He who has not lived in those years when the old
world disappearing and the new one making its way cannot
is

realize the tragedy of life, for at such times the old is still

sufficiently strong to resist the assaults of the new and the

latter,though growing, is not yet strong enough to annihilate
that world on the ruins of which alone it will be able to pros-

per. Men are then called upon to solve insoluble problems and
 MERRY-GO-ROUND 25

to attempt enterprises which are both necessary and impos-

sible. There confusion everywhere in the mind within and
is

in the world without. Hate often separates those who ought to

aid one another since they are tending toward the same goal,
and sympathy binds men together who are forced to do battle
with one another.

Itoo was impressed for the moment by the penetration

of Ferrero's thought, and recalled that Bernard Shaw had
once dramatized this situation in Saint Joan. But remem-

bering the role of the Pacific coast press in breaking the

general strike and promoting the red-hunting sequel, it

was with difficulty that I resisted the temptation also to
quote a fragment of Lewis Carroll:
"I like the walrus best," said Alice, "because you see he
was a little sorry for the oysters."
"He atemore than the carpenter, though," said Twee-
dledee. "You see, he held his handkerchief in front so
that the carpenter couldn't count how many he took. Con-
trariwise."

"Did you see farmers?" they asked. I saw and talked to

hundreds of farmers of all kinds, and the significant fact
about them of course is that they are of all kinds. Is a plan-
tation owner he is frequently a corporation a farmer? Is
a share-cropper a farmer? Is a Mexican stoop laborer or
American fruit tramp employed in the industrialized agri-
culture of the Imperial Valley a farmer? Is the American
Fruit Company a farmer? Some of the middle-western
farmers organized in the Farmers Union and Farm Holi-
day Association are beginning to think, but not in terms
of Russian communism. Why should they? They are
26 INTRODUCTION

property owners, business men, small capitalists broke,

desperate, but still
capitalists.
And what about planning? Certainly the operations of
the New Deal have given vast currency to the concept of

planning. They have also served to obscure and in many

respects to aggravate the dilemma which planning is sup-
posed to solve. Here and there I ran into people involved
in the work
of the state planning commissions whose re-

ports were turned in to the National Resources Board.

They seemed to be of two sorts: regional boosters with an
axe to grind and liberal dilettantes. I did meet one man
who was neither. He was a distinguished man of science
with a confirmed habit of using exact definitions, and he
seemed to feel that the President had used the word "plan-
ning" either brashly or inexactly. If the latter, he wasn't
interested. It was obviously impossible to plan fragments
of a closely integrated national economy and then collate
these fragments into anything remotely resembling a gen-
uine plan. Moreover, such a genuine plan could only be
constructed on the basis of complete socialization of both
land and industrial resources and strict government con-
trol of foreign trade. Probably the President didn't really
mean planning. Because if he did, he would shortly find

himself in the position of the respectable gentleman who

dined too well one evening and on his way home delib-
erately broke a plate glass window. When he was arraigned
in court the next morning the judge said: "George, you're
a man greatly esteemed in this community. Why did you
break that plate glass window?" George thought a moment
and replied: "Judge, I'm sorry, but this morning I can't
 MERRY-GO-ROUND 27

precisely tell you. However, last night I must have had

some kind of a big idea."
The New Deal, I discovered, had already grown its crop
of anecdotes, and many of them bore a striking resem-
blance to those nurtured in the
soil of the German, Italian
and Russian dictatorships. Some of them seemed to have
been freshly coined in Washington, but they had reached
the periphery with airplane speed; the ones I heard in
Chicago had reached Minneapolis intellectuals ahead of
me. Incidentally, one of the chastening and salutary things
a traveler out of New York learns is that the brains of the
country are not concentrated on the narrow island of Man-
hattan. On
the contrary I came to suspect that the middle-
western, southern and western intellectuals, to use a vul-
garized but still useful word, are healthier and more in
touch with American realities than either Columbia Uni-
versity or Union Square.

But these intellectuals constitute only a microscopic

fraction of the 5 per cent of the population who are at
all conscious, politically and socially. And the fact that
they are thinking is
probably less important than the fact
that the 95 per cent are not thinking, have little access
to the materials of thought indeed are not even act-

ing, not even achieving the simple response to pressures

that was feared by conservatives and hoped for by radicals.
What about the ten million unemployed, the twenty mil-
lion on relief?
The more I saw of them, in the cities, in the relief bu-
on the road, the more I
reaus, in the transient shelters,
was depressed and outraged both by their physical and
28 INTRODUCTION

spiritual wretchedness and by their passive acceptance of

their condition. In the end I came to feel that the failure
of the unemployed to demand and secure relief or em-
ployment sufficient to maintain a decent living standard
is the most serious, the most crucial of all our failures as a

people. I am not alone in that feeling. I found it shared

by labor organizers everywhere even by relief directors.
In an article entitled "The Road to Destitution" in
Harper's Magazine, G. Hartley Grattan says: "It is not a
tribute to the American people that they have 'taken it*
without protest; it is rather a distressing symptom of the
disintegration of spirit which has been the inevitable ac-
companiment of widespread destitution. As more and
more people have been engulfed by it, we should, had not
all the revolt been beaten out of them in fending off this

unwanted and unwonted end, have had demonstrations

and protests galore. It is a bad sign that we have not. The
reliefpopulation is not to be described as a patient group
of patriotic Americans who would not think of storming
the citadels, but as a collection of dispirited, beaten, ex-
hausted individuals who have been racked to pieces on
the road to destitution and who, now that they have ar-
rived at the end of it, take what respite the relief grant

offers and say nothing."

My notebooks fully document this analysis. In Toledo,
for example, the unemployed call the Transient Shelter
"Farewell House," in grim recognition of the fact that
these refuges for the un-familied, the wandering, the desti-
tute, are in effect factories for the
making not merely of
unemployables, but of a lumpenproletariat of abject,
physically and morally disintegrated human beings. The
 MERRY-GO-ROUND 2Q

unemployed leaders confess that it is almost impossible

to organize them they are too far gone. Their role in a

revolutionary crisis would almost undoubtedly be that of

an anarchic, ferocious, looting mob.
Wherever I went, I found that the morale of the unem-
ployed was low or high depending upon how soon the

unemployed organizations had got started, and how mili-

tantly they had been led. If early in the depression there
had been enough organized, disciplined, and directed pro-
test, the relief scale was relatively high, and the unem-

ployed had become unemployable to a much smaller

degree. In these relatively well-organized areas, as for ex-
ample Toledo, the unemployed, instead of being labor
pariahs and scabs, were likely to play militant roles in the
strikes of theiremployed brothers. The philosophy of the
unemployed leaders was expressed in the slogan: "Catch
'em early and teach 'em how to get tough." As Mr. Grat-
tan's observations indicate, the weakness of the American
radical movement has been such that it hasn't been able
to catch enough of them early enough and teach them
to get tough enough. Here again we are confronted with
the paradox of violence. It is inevitable, even socially nec-

essary and expedient.

Interestingly enough, I found that a good many relief
directors recognized this. In a western city an unemployed
worker came to the relief office to protest a relief cut. The
went through the routine explanation of
relief director
how impossible it was to give the unemployed enough to
live on. Then the man said: "I'm sick of this. I'm going
to smash that window." The face of the relief director
lighted. "Fine. But don't hurt yourself. Better wrap this
30 INTRODUCTION
handkerchief around your hand." He did smash the win-
dow and he did hurt his hand. But when the police came,
called by a frightened stenographer, the relief client had
vanished, his hand carefully bandaged by the more so-
phisticated members of the staff, who were now in a posi-
tion to report to their superiors convincing evidence that
the relief scale must be increased.
This relief director, like an increasing number of the
social workers who are operating the relief apparatus,
knows all the questions and problems which I have
sketched. He is one of the 5 per cent who know, the

questions but are by no means in agreement as to the

answers.
The 95 per cent don't even know the questions. They
don't think; the press, the radio, the movies do not give
them the materials of thought, but instead give them
obsolete stereotypes. But they feel, and despite their pres-
ent passivity they will respond to pressures; ultimately they
will act. Howwill they act? It seems to me that they will
take the easiest way out; not the best way, but the easiest
way, a way which requires neither knowledge of the ques-
tions, nor answering the questions in either thought or
action. It is the
of their ancestors, the barbarian way,
way
the "American" way, the logical extension into the inter-
national arena of the interrupted sweep of pioneer con-
quest. It dodges all the domestic issues, of democracy
versus dictatorship, of "freedom" versus security; it
finances consumption and solves unemployment; it merges
all the fears into a single fear, all the hatreds into a single

hatred. It is the way of war; war in the Pacific; war with

Japan, probably, as Nathaniel Peffer has predicted, in
 MERRY-GO-ROUND $1

alliance with Great Britain; a trade war, designed to break

Japan's grip upon the Chinese market, and so release the

intolerable pressures of American capitalist overproduc-
tion and under-consumption.
The 95 per cent don't know the questions. But they
know the answer, know it in their bones. "I guess things
won't get any better until we have another war." How
many times did I hear that all across the continent
and back! Mechanics looking for work, fruit tramps, the
unemployed in the cities, the farmers stranded in the
drought areas, small business men they all had that an-
swer. Where had they got it? The war propaganda is not

yet overt, even in the Hearst press. These people, the

95 per cent, were untouched by socialist, communist,
or pacifist education. But they knew the answer. Not
that they were for it, particularly. They were merely re-

Being unable to think through or act through any

signed.
program for the solution of the domestic dilemma in its
own intransigently difficult terms, they regarded not with-
out hope the prospect of being relieved of the burden of
all thought, all responsibility. A war would solve it, they
felt,even though some of them perceived vaguely that a
war would only postpone and deepen the ultimate disaster.
They are admirable material for "voluntary conscrip-
admirable material for "democratic
tion," this 95 per cent;
fascism," or whatever other name will be devised for it.

Last spring the hawks that hover over Wisconsin and

Michigan saw another straight-line pioneer trek: the 200
farm families headed for the Matanuska Valley in Alaska,
where the government is establishing a colony. At about
32 INTRODUCTION
the same time the Pacific gulls were witnessing the mass
flight of naval planes to Hawaii and the elaborate and
costly war game of the navy, played around Wake Island,
obviously with Japan as the hypothetical enemy. Possibly
the two events were not without some connection, since
Alaska would be the logical military and naval base for a
war in the Pacific.
Is it possible that before long the hawks may see that

milling movement of men in automobiles, which I have

described, straighten out into marching lines, military con-
voys, a new surge of conquest destined this time to hurdle
the ocean barrier and hurl itself upon the Asiatic main-
land? It seems at once incredible and more probable than
any other denouement I have been able to imagine for the
current American tragedy. It will answer none of the ques-
tions and solve none of the problems. It will almost cer-

tainly precipitate another domestic merry-go-round, con-

cerning which only two things can be predicted: it will
be violent, and it will not be merry.
 STARTING WEST FROM EASTON

I told my neighbor, Odd Mark Wheeler, that

WHEN I intended to
spend the next seven months on the
road in an automobile, trying to find out what was happen-
ing to the country at large and, in particular, chasing New
Deal butterflies, he remarked:
"Well, I suspect you'd do a lot better by settin' right
to home in Easton."
Now that I am back, Odd Mark's observation still wor-
ries me. It doesn't seem so odd as when I first heard it.
What he had in mind, I think, was that my home town-
ship is in many respects a representative microcosm of
America; way, my trip was an attempt to substi-
that, in a
motion for motions of the mind which might
tute physical
be expended more profitably at home.
Odd Mark has sat still or, rather, cultivated his acres
for seventy years on top of a hill in southern Connecticut.
He has never been to New York. He did not choose to
visit New York. Yet Odd Mark is neither poor nor stupid.
Indeed, I much respect for his weathered sapience
have so
that I am
led to compromise with him; to sketch this
southern Connecticut microcosm as a point of departure
for my continental chase of New Deal ephemera.
I live on Crow Hill, which is in the township of Easton,
Connecticut, about sixty miles from New York. In recent
33
34 INTRODUCTION

years Easton has become one of the outlying suburbs of

Bridgeport. It and the adjoining township of Weston
were settled in 1750 or thereabout. Easton is east of Nor-
walk and Weston is west of Easton. In the horse-and-buggy
days perhaps that meant something. Originally Weston
included Easton, but the intervening ridge made com-
munication difficult, so they split. Today they are joined
by paved automobile roads, and and ad-
their political
ministrative separation is as archaic and cumbersome as
the ancient sleighs and buckboards that still clutter the
barns of some of my neighbors.
In the earlier years of my residence, when I sighted a
forest fire on the ridge north of me, I was never quite sure
whether to call the Easton fire warden or the Weston fire
warden. Not that it made much difference. Experience
showed that called the superintendent of the water
if I

company which owns much of the land in the Saugatuck

and Aspectuck Valleys and serves a half dozen towns along
the Sound, their employees would get there first and put
out the regardless of the jurisdictional privileges or
fire,

responsibilities involved. Not, I add hastily, that Easton

doesn't have a good volunteer fire department; indeed, we
have a new truck and the fire laddies, "at jeopardy of life
and limb" to use the phrase of a former fire chief in a
town meeting address, are enthusiastic about going to fires.
But in the matter of protecting my own wood lot, I soon
learned to take advantage of "enlightened self-interest."
The corporate, absentee owner of the water company,
whoever that multiple personality may be, is by and large
the duke of my township; the water company's orchards,
its nurseries, represent the most substantial agricultural
 STARTING WEST FROM EASTON 35

investment; protected reservoirs and streams are strictly

its

private property; its power of condemnation is something

for realtors and home-seekers to keep in mind.

History is written in faint but still legible traces all over

my township. The
pre-revolutionary turnpike between
Greens Farms and Danbury crosses the ridge within a few
hundred yards of my house. The redcoats traveled this
pike when, in 1777, the British troops under General
Tryon landed at Greens Farms and marched north to
burn the stores of the revolutionary army at Danbury;
doubtless the ancestors of the Merwins, the Freeborns, the
Sherwoods good Connecticut Yankee names you find on
many a rural mail box took pot shots at them from be-
hind the stone walls which still mark the route of the
ancient turnpike. It is a wood trail now, although it has
never been legally closed. Fifty years ago, when houses still
stood on the now crumbling rock foundations, it was
known as "Nigger Lane." In the years preceding the
Negroes had replaced the more adventurous Connecticut
Yankees who had gone north into the more fertile valleys
of Vermont, west along the Mohawk to the "Holland Pur-
chase" in western New York, west into the fat lands of
Ohio, still west into Iowa, Nebraska, across the Rockies
along the Oregon trail, always west. Some of my own
ancestors Churchills, Adamses, Cogswells followed that
route; a few of them went even farther. They became mis-
sionaries and carried the moral Methodism
certitudes of
all the
way up the Yangtze River.
The Negroes gave up and left for parts unknown long
before I came to Crow Hill, although the clutch of ivy
and dogwood on the dry-laid walls has not yet wholly
36 INTRODUCTION
obliterated the evidences of this comparatively recent hu-
man occupation. Only a month ago, poking through the
underbrush for lady slippers, I came upon another old
well.
have often wondered why the original pioneers in-
I

sisted upon trying to farm Crow Hill. It was just at this

point that the glacier, which once slid all the way into
Long Island Sound, dropped its Gargantuan apron and
deposited a prodigious tonnage of rocks. They were there
in 1750, and they are still there, some of them piled in
walls five feet high and six feet wide surrounding two acre
lots, but most of them still in the fields, as I learn to my
sorrow every spring when I try tomake a garden. It is

even worse north of me in the region known locally as

"The Den," a five-mile stretch of rocky hills and
Devil's

gulches, covered with a mangy growth of birch and scrub

oak, and burned over so often that even the wild flowers
of the region have become discouraged. A much over-

grown relic of the ancient pike traverses this region; part

of itwas cleared a couple of years ago by the Fairfield
County Hunt Club for purposes of fox hunting. But last
year the millionaire who owns most of Crow Hill em-
ployed a fox hunter who trapped over thirty foxes. It
seems the foxes ate the solemn, mandarin-like pheasants
which he imported to stock his private shooting preserve.
Ultimately, I suppose Crow Hill will be populated only by
the millionaire, his pheasants, and a few rattlesnakes that
still lurk in the rocks of the northern hills.

The
contemplation of this prospect, I reflect, will prob-
ably make old Charlie Babcock climb out of his grave
again. Old Charlie once inhabited the house I bought
 STARTING WEST FROM EASTON 37

when I first came to Crow Hill. I got to know him well,

for I held animated conversation with his ghost for a

period of nearly three years. Legend has it that Charlie,

being a dour, hard-working man, consumed by a hatred
of the rocks the glacier had dumped on Crow Hill, used
to stayup late and lay wall by moonlight. In the end he
lost hismind and spent the last years of his life in a nar-
row room, cared for by two maiden daughters who died
only a few years ago. In his demented state he would rise
at four in the morning, tramp the oak boards of his prison
and go through the customary routine of his day. "Gee!
Haw!" he would shout. "God's curse on these stones!" I
learned these and other facts about the ordeal of Charlie
Babcock when, after increasing evidence that my wife and
I were not alone in the house, I went to old residents of

the neighborhood and sought explanations. Charlie's chair-

tipping and other more or less conventional ghost per-

formances had become pretty annoying and I decided to
do something about it. So the next time he appeared, not
so much as a physical presence, but as a tension, an urgency
that made it impossible for me or my wife to work or even
to talk to each other, I spoke to him, directly and sym-

pathetically, asking what troubled him, what moved him

to revisit, almost every time the moon was full, the scene
of his unhappy earthly struggle.
I never got a complete sentence in reply; a few obscure
phrases only, and these possibly suggested by my own
stimulated imagination: "No cattle? That south field . . .

cut it like cheese." What annoyed Charlie, as far as I

could make out, was that the land he had given his life
to make arable was growing up to blueberries and cedars;
38 INTRODUCTION
that the house was occupied not by farmers, but by writers
who did little but read and write our unkempt
else
kitchen garden could scarcely be called farming.
I explained our situation to Charlie as best I could. But
I had to keep on explaining for nearly three years it was

the only way I could keep him quiet. Some of the old peo-
ple in the region believed me when I told them what was
going on. But none of my friends did. They made silly
remarks about my being half-Irish, after all. To which I
replied that my wife was not Irish, but German, and
Westphalian at that. Moreover, it was she who had wit-
nessed Charlie's last appearance but one.
One brilliant October night she was reading before the
fire when the clock fell off the mantel and Charlie ran

around the corner of the fireplace. My wife saw him

clearly on that occasion. She says he was only about six
inches high and impressed her as being very sad. His
midget embodiment still puzzles me, but I give my wife's
explanation for what it may be worth: she believes that
our protracted metaphysical arguments had shrunk him.
A few nights later a whippoorwill perched outside my
window and chanted steadily for over an hour. At last,
suspecting who it was, I threw open the window and de-
nounced him roundly for a bore and a nuisance. He went
away, and believe it or not, no whippoorwill has ever come
near the house since.

We are in a new house now and I haven't seen Charlie

in years. But I remember other griefs that he confided to
me in those moonlight interviews, especially his chronic
objection to "furriners." In Charlie's opinion the mil-
 STARTING WEST FROM EASTON 39
lionaire and his supercilious Chinese pheasants were just
as foreign and just as objectionable as the Poles, Lithu-
anians, and Hungarians who, following the armistice and
the deflation of Bridgeport's munitions industries, had
gone back into the country and rehabilitated many of the
abandoned farms. Charlie's feeling in this matter is shared
by many of the surviving old-timers, including Odd Mark
Wheeler. This feeling becomes acute with respect to cer-
tain urban emigres like Old Man Hutchinson, a Wall
Street operator who bought a farm in the region the year
after the stock market crash. In that year he spent $30,000
and transformed a beautiful natural landscape into a mean-
ingless replica of hundreds of other small country estates
in Westchester and Long Island. Old Man Hutchinson
had retired, he declared. The game was up and he had
dug himself into the country to wait for the revolution.
(It is rumored that his cellar is an arsenal of machine

guns, ammunition, and canned goods, but I cannot vouch

for that.)
Old Man Hutchinson is something of a
rarity, although
not altogether unique. The farmers in my region have
cheerfully used the panic of these refugees to peg real
estate values.But they do not respect them. Hutchinson,
as Odd Mark has explained to me, is one reason why he
has successfully resisted the temptation to visit New York.
"He don't know nothing," says Odd Mark. "He don't
even know how he made his money or why he's losing it

now. He can't set still. He's on the road day and night in
that big go-devil of his. I expect Bill Myers will have a

wrecking job out of him almost any day now. He ain't

happy, and why should he be? He run out of Wall Street
40 INTRODUCTION
like a youngster that's set fire to a haystack. Only he ain't
a youngster. He's a pot-bellied old fool, and if he don't pay
for the wood I drawed for him, I'll put the law on him."
The other "furriners" and second generation
the first

of the Central European immigrant stock are viewed

with a suspicion which is suspended with respect to par-
ticular individuals who have successfully "Americanized"
themselves; that is to say, who have more or less solved
the problem of getting abreast, or even a little ahead of
the native Joneses. The most successful contractor-realtor
in thetown is a Pole. The leading storekeeper is a Ger-
man. Both of these prominent citizens stand with their
fellow-foreigners with respect to political issues, within
the limits of reason and practicality. These limits were
reached a couple of years ago when the dominant Republi-
can Party split, resulting in the election, for one of the
very few times in history, of a Democratic first Selectman.
The Socialists were also in the field with a ticket headed
by the German
storekeeper, the major plank of their local
platform having to do with alleged discrimination against
the back-country "furriners" in the matter of tax assess-
ments. The Democrats elected a local magician literally,
a legerdemain artist who quarreled loudly with the Re-
publican town clerk, attempted vainly to put over some
grandiose ideas of reform, and at the end of his term de-
parted from the community. The Socialists, despite the
support given by Jasper MacLevy the Socialist mayor
of Bridgeport and his lieutenants, also faded. Economic
determinism did it. The native Yankees stopped trading
with the Socialist storekeeper until he was obliged to with-
draw from politics.
 STARTING WEST FROM EASTON 41

Weare again safely Republican in Easton and things

are much as they were when I first came to the community,

except that roads and schools have improved and the town

meetings are perhaps a little less hilarious than formerly.

Not much, however, because this hilarity is a community
asset, a kind of substitute for a folk theater. At first
I kept

a straight face at these meetings, not wishing to appear

supercilious or "uppity." But shortly I noticed that our
most respected citizens felt no such obligation. When a
clerk and
belligerent ancient shook his fist at the town
shouted: "What about that $16.33 that was never ac-
counted for in 1925!" everybody laughed jovially. In time
I cameto suspect that some of these acts were planted
for purposes of pure theater. Underneath there are serious
conflicts, of course, the chief ones having to do with the
growing pressure of the immigrant sector of the popula-
tion for a greater voice in the town's affairs. But the con-
vention of public business in Easton is the convention of
the theater; any breach of this convention is regarded as
bad form, and the offender as a spoil-sport.
Moreover, you have to be pretty much of an insider
before you know how to vote. At some of the town meet-
ings my wife and I were completely mystified and voted
yes and no, believing it to be safer to let nature take its
course. You could never tell. What seemed like graft might
be a disguised form of unemployed relief. The eloquent
tribune of the people might be interested in some contract.
How could we know? It was almost impossible to disen-
tangle the realities from the dramatic make-believe.
Easton is both inside and outside of the main stream of
the economic and political crisis. It is outside to the degree
42 INTRODUCTION
that it is
enjoying a fortuitous eddy of expansion. Un-
doubtedly the chief industry of the town is the selling of
old farm houses and farm land to city people. Easton has
grown even during the depression and the prices of real
estate, which slumped in 1931 and 1932, have come back
almost to the pre-depression level. The number of New
York commuters increasing. Fantastic as it sounds, they
is

spend as much
four hours in traveling to and from
as

work, and some of them do this winter and summer.

But the Easton farmers also make milk and grow more
truck than they can sell on the roadside stands; also many
of the sons and daughters of immigrants and natives alike
work in Bridgeport, which for years has been an open shop
town, with the employers' blacklist used effectively to
abort recurrent attempts at unionization. For a while
Bridgeport was a sordid paradise for the sweatshop op-
erators who fled into Connecticut to escape the clutches
of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. The New
Deal helped this a little temporarily and the state labor
department put some of these racketeers out of business,
but by no means all of them. The farm girls are still glad
to get off the farm for a while, even at weekly wages of as
little as four and five dollars. The extremes reached by

this exploitation and difficulty of abating it are indicated

by a headline in the Bridgeport Herald: "Court refuses to
back up labor department in Monroe sweatshop case."
One of the state's witnesses in this case was a Bridgeport
girl who said she worked in the shop at Monroe, a village
about ten miles north of Bridgeport, for three weeks, from
4.30 in the afternoon until 9 or 10 o'clock at night, and
received only 75 cents for her work. According to the
 STARTING WEST FROM EASTON 43

Bridgeport Herald, "the state labor department waited for

an entire year in its efforts to secure a conviction against
two sweatshop bosses charged with 16 separate counts of
violations of labor laws, only to see the criminal superior
court in Bridgeport dismiss the charges against one man
and fine the other $25 and costs." The newspaper account
does not attempt to portray the social and economic situa-
tion of the women and girls who are obliged to seek work
on suchterms. Obviously it must be desperate. But other

newspaper stories offer a clue to this desperation and its

entailed social consequences. A
while back a Bridgeport
girl was arraigned in police court charged with street-
"
walking. The Herald reports the case as follows: 'What
do they call you?'asked the desk sergeant of Angelina.
'Angel,' replied the lass with becoming modesty, and the

sergeant went in the back room and talked to himself

for half an hour, which he took an aspirin and re-
after

ported off duty." The moral backof the grim levity of

this story, of course, is that Angelina should have worked
three weeks for 75 cents and remained a good girl.

But one does not have go to Bridgeport to encounter

to

desperation. The working farmers of Easton and the sur-

rounding region know it too. Last winter a friend of mine
talked to his milkman, who had once been a prosperous
salesman. The depression had obliged him to convert what
had been his hobby, the raising of fancy dairy cattle, into
a means of livelihood. He got up at five o'clock in the

morning to peddle the product of his pure-bred Jerseys

and Guernseys. Sometimes his truck skidded into the ditch.
My friend suggested that he wind old rope around his
44 INTRODUCTION
rear tires.The milkman replied: "Do you know what I'd
do if I had that much good rope? I'd" and his hands
described the hangman's gesture.

Thereis no industry in Easton unless, before this is

printed, some garment trade racketeer moves a truck load

of machinery into an empty barn and we imagine, a
fatuously perhaps, that we are
little little affected by these
peripheral industrial disturbances. Our industries died

many years ago; many of the mill dams fell into the
streams and the water company acquired the stream rights.
One and
of the last industries to die was the saw mill

forge that drew power from the Saugatuck at Valley Forge,

only a mile or two below me. The forge originally used
charcoal to smelt the ore mined in the surrounding hills
and the woods are full of abandoned charcoal kilns. The
saw mill was operating as late as twenty years ago; it turned
out the oak flooring of my living room and the forge made
good hoes and axes; also hardware which is still proudly
exhibited by some of the local antique hunters. Both will
be covered by several feet of water when the water com-
pany gets around to building its projected dam. We get
our lumber from Washington now and our hardware from
Sears, Roebuck; we get our culture and recreation over
the radio; as for our religion, some of us have learned to
substitute gardens, leaving it pretty much to the older
residents to keep the church going by such arduous expedi-
ents as chicken dinners and cake sales. Last summer the

Congregational minister left for Lander, Wyoming. The

outside subsidy which had supplemented his meager salary
could not be continued, and there is now some talk of
 STARTING WEST FROM EASTON 45

combining the local churches. The departed minister was

a good, kindly and devoted man who used to save gasoline
by making many of his calls on foot. I am sorry
he is gone,
and blame myself for hoeing my garden instead of going
to church. Doubtless there is still sin in the community,
but most of it is related to business in one way or another,
and the church has somehow failed to connect up with the
main business drive of the town.
This business, as already indicated, is the collection of
unearned increment on land, with some incidental traffic
in the charm with which the passage of years has clothed
our Colonial saltbox houses, our spinning wheels, our
iron kettles and other antiques. In this business we are

competing strenuously with Weston, Westport, Redding,

and Newtown, all of which communities have a consider-
able start on us. We are all parasiting upon the metropolis
and upon the residual capital and income which the metro-
politans salvaged from the stock market crash. The tech-
nique of this parasitism is fairly simple, although its rami-
fications are infinite.
You start with a realtor and a saltbox house. The realtor
sells the saltbox house to an artist, who
American
in the
middle class mythology is also quaint, interesting, and
authentic in and of himself. The artist then more or less
innocently connives with the realtor to sell a neighboring
saltbox house to another artist who in turn lends himself
to the realtor's game. As the game proceeds, both the
saltbox houses and the artists tend to become less and less
authentic. The later saltbox houses cost more and contain
fewer sound timbers. The be
later artists are likely to
commercial artists, fictioneers, and advertising men. But
46 INTRODUCTION

by that time the realtor, having acquired his nucleus of

quaintness, doesn't have to bother with acquiring any
more authenticity. Also, by that time the cost of living has
risen, the farmers are charging city prices for vegetables
and and some of the original artists have become land
eggs,
poor and house poor. The time is ripe for the marriage
of authenticity and money and the realtor is a good
schatchen. He goes to some metropolitan tycoon, who per-

haps has a poetasting wife, and tells him that what he

needs to take his mind off the crassnesses of holding com-
pany finance is a lovely little saltbox house in an artist
community. The tycoon bites; so does the impoverished
artist when he hears what the tycoon is prepared to pay
for his saltbox house, his saddleback chairs, and his
Colonial sugar bowls.
The game now enters its second phase. The realtor now
has another kind of authenticity to exploit. He has an
authentic tycoon who, feeling a little lonely, soon helps
the realtor sell another saltbox house to another tycoon,
who in turn brings others. They get together and start
a country club, then a hunt club. Pretty soon it is the
artists who feel lonely. Incidentally, most of the saltbox
houses have by this time been buried under supplementary
architectural and horticultural lavishness.
In this transformed community, it becomes hard for the
artists to keep their minds on their art, which is likely
to become somewhat less authentic themore their artistic-
ness exploited by the realtors.
is Some of them engage
directly or indirectly in the real estate business. They are
to be seen shamefacedly knocking little balls over green
hills are they playing golf or "making contacts"? Any day
 STARTING WEST FROM EASTON 47

now expect to drop into the studio of one of my

I artist

friends and find him doing a self-portrait of the artist

attired in a red coat and riding breeches of a Master of

the Hunt. The mutation of species will then be complete
and I shall duly inform the American Genetic Society.
However, all is for the best in the best of all possible
worlds. A magnificent job of community building has been
achieved. Land prices are out of sight, very few saltbox
houses are left and these mostly synthetic. Everything costs
more than it does in New York, everything looks newer
and shinier and everybody drinks more and is better
dressed. (That story by the Winsted correspondent of the
New York Times about a drunken woodchuck having
been seen wearing shorts is probably authentic well, as
authentic as anything else that comes out of these artist
communities.) Moreover, the artists, the near-artists, the
rich and the near-rich have been presented free with a
Great Purpose in Life. That purpose, as you immediately
you read such publications as the Westport Town
realize if
Crier is to keep the realtors, the inn-keepers, the grocers,
the hair-dressers, and dear old Connecticut Light and
Power happy and prospering. To do this everybody must
buy a great many things, drink a little more, if possible,
and engage competitively in a multitude of activities which
are glowingly described and sedulously stimulated by the
local boosters. But everybody is a booster. Everybody has

got to be, for financial reasons if for nothing else. booster A

for what? For the unearned increment. For the "progress"
of the community. A
booster for this curiously barbaric

enterprise in which everybody makes his living by taking

in his neighbor's washing.
48 INTRODUCTION
The most curious thing about it is that everybody seems
to me more or less broke and more or less worried. Every-

body has a headache: the artists because they suspect they

may have stopped being artists, the tradesmen because
the artists have not only lost their quaint artistic habits,
but also their habits of paying bills; the realtors because
the unearned increment isn't what it used to be; the ty-
coons because their taxes are too high.
When these headaches are practically universal, an artist
community is entitled to feel that it has arrived. We in
Easton are only beginning, but I fear that we are on our
way. We have a number of quaintly delapidated saltbox
houses. We have a few artists and writers Ida Tarbell is
one of them. And we have our tycoons; two of them.
A year or so ago Easton dedicated the new library which
it has established in its new central schoolhouse. The
writers received special invitations to the dedication cere-
monies. Miss Tarbell contributed her books, being unable
to attend. But Berton Braley and I stood up and were
counted, feeling silly and even a little quaint. Nothing else
was asked of us; merely to stand up and let the audience
look at thought the tycoons also should have been
us. I

stood up for counting and inspection, but nobody men-

tioned them. Braley and I both puzzled over this. Why
hadn't they asked one of us to make a speech? Or to help
them write the pretty poor dramatic sketch which the chil-
dren acted? Why hadn't they used us, instead of exhibit-
ing us as grade A celebrities, which we weren't? Surely,
had been barn-raising in pioneer days we should have
if it

been put to work, and would have felt ourselves a part

of the community.
 STARTING WEST FROM EASTON 49
The more I think of it, the more it seems tome that
we in Easton are much more quaint than our New Eng-
land forefathers ever dreamed of being. They built their
saltbox houses as they did because it was cheaper and more
convenient. They cast their iron kettles to boil sap in, not
to hang up empty before a fireless fireplace. The cabinet
maker who made our antique cherry table would be called
an artist today, but they called him a cabinet maker then
and no nonsense about it. The tombstone maker who
sculptured the death angels on tombstones dating back
to 1770 in some of the Easton graveyards was an artist,
even, in my opinion, a gifted artist. But they called him
a stone mason and I am sure nobody ever asked him to
stand up and be counted on public occasions. He was a
stone mason and if he got so interested in his death angels
and in what he could do with slate and sandstone that
he sculptured a whole series of moving bas-relief portraits
of a most interesting woman why, that was his own affair.
He got paid, as a stone mason, for carving a death angel.
Nobody knows his name, although he is probably buried
under one of those tombstones. But while he lived it seems
to me that he probably had a fairly good time and enjoyed
a self-respecting, intelligible relationship to his community,
which is more than can be said of most modern artists, in
artist communities or elsewhere.
What has happened to us in America? Have we lost
all instinct for reality, all aptitude for simple human rela-
one of the consequences perhaps the
tionships? IsTthat
major consequence of our "progress"? Does that explain
the intolerable flimsiness of these parasitic swank-artistic
communities why they seem like paste diamonds set in an
50 INTRODUCTION

ugly matrix of economic and social chaos? Are artists really

quaint? Indeed, they merit the insult if they allow them-
selves to be so used.
think of old Charlie Babcock's ghost. Did I with my
I

metaphysical garrulousness really succeed in shrinking

him? Or was it that, failing to drive me into doing a decent
day'swork on his stony acres, he finally gave up in disgust
and went away? Did .Charlie the thought is dreadful
enough did he end by dismissing me too as "quaint"?
On my trip across the country I saw other artist com-
munities, but none in which art and the artist had been
creatively integrated with the social and economic pattern.
I saw other communities boasting neither art nor artists,
and badly in need of both. Always the broken balance;

always the fetishism of commodities; everywhere the vul-

garization of the concept of progress. Indeed, I accumu-
lated enough pessimism so that I began to wonder if my
melancholy wasn't after all a kind of sentimental defeat-
ism. But before I finished I had also discovered ground for
a certain stoic optimism.
I had rediscovered for myself a most beautiful land, and

a most vital, creative, and spiritually unsubdued people.

The present is tragic enough; the years ahead will be even
more tragic in all probability. But they will be less silly,
less futile on the whole.
They will be worthier at least I find myself able to

hope this in the sight of God and man.

 I HURRIED TOO MUCH

would be good to travel over America again and do

IT nothing but look, listen,and learn: not from poli-
ticians, "planners," officials and other microscopically in-
formed and harassed people, but merely from the natural
and human landscape. I did too little of this.
Instead, I was obliged for the first two or three months
of my journey to hurry from one industrial city or state

capital to another, and twice a week send off a brief digest

of the ephemeral facts and impressions I had gathered.
I remember showing a Pittsburgh newspaperman my cre-

dential letter from the New York Post, which informed

all and sundry that I was doing a "social and economic

survey of the United States." He grinned at me wearily

and said, "Fine. Where's your army?" By the time I reached
Montana I was completely waterlogged with miscellaneous
information, and unable to stop hurrying it had become
a habit.
I fumbled with maps and glared apprehensively at road
signs. Both seemed utterly inadequate, unimaginative, and

capable, unless you watched them closely, of obscure,

malicious tricks. Once, as a result of such a trick I drove
fifty miles, at night,
and landed in a waterless wheat town
somewhere north of Great Falls, Montana. There I discov-
ered I had driven in precisely the wrong direction. Being
5i
52 INTRODUCTION

wretchedly tired after four hundred miles of idiotic hustle

over a landscape that had wooed me vainly with a thou-
sand tongues of beauty and mystery, I went grumpily to
bed, promising myself that I would rise early and make
up for lost time.
But the next morning that slighted landscape had its
revenge. A round red sun glared straight into my eyes.
Blinded, I went off the road twice, but the ditch being
half-full of wind-blown wheat land I was able to plow

through the tumbleweed and back on the concrete.

Still I wouldn't stop, look, and listen, although the warn-

ing was clear. The landscape was fed up with me, and at
the next curve I ran squarely into a post.
Fine. Twenty miles from a garage, with a smashed radi-
ator and steering gear and other miscellaneous damage.
Indignantly I glared back at that bland, red sun-face, on
which thought I detected a faint, ironic smirk.
I

Saul was a hustler, too, I reflected, and something like

that had happened to him on the road to Damascus, al-

though I liked him even less after he became Paul. How-

ever, maybe I had better relax a little:there was plenty of
time now.
So I relaxed for three hours waiting for the wrecker.
I wondered about the pioneers. Had they seen this land-

scape when they crept over it with their ox-carts and their
straggling cattle? But no, they too were hurrying toward
water holes, and tortured by fear of Indians. . . . The
Indians, then. Yes, perhaps they had had moments of quiet-
ness in the intervals of tribal warfare. Surely their nerves
were less raveled than those of their ludicrously confused
and quarreling conquerors. You can feel it in their songs
 I 'HukRiED Too MUCH 53

when they sing them, which is rarely: also in their gift

of silence, which they still keep.
A few miles south of Havre, Montana, I had picked up
a middle-aged squaw who had sat silently beside me for

fifty miles. Baffled by her monosyllabic answers to my ques-

tions I had turned my attention to the landscape: the wide
flatvalley of the Missouri lifting on the south into low
buttes, and beyond these the sharp, pure line of the snow-
covered Rockies. Such spacious, remote and flowing slopes
and mesas! And the austere peaks that shadowed them,
what were they saying? Some sort of intransigent affirma-
tion or negation both, I supposed. If I lived with them,
I reflected, as did the ranchers whose low shacks were pin
points in the great distances, then I would have to listen,
and perhaps learn.
I turned to the squaw beside me. She, too, was looking

and listening. And her face, as I remember it, was quieter

and more beautiful than any other face, of all the scores
of hitch-hikers I gave rides to.
Indeed, most of those conquering whites who rode with
me were profoundly unquiet. They were in flight from
somebody or something, going nowhere in particular, and
garrulous with bewilderment and half-confessed terror.
Sitting beside me, while that irritatingly constant motor
affronted the perfect distances of desert and mountain with
its meaningless conquest, these acquaintances of an hour,

a day, told me all, without my asking. The most intimate

confidences of the mind and of the heart were babbled
into the ear of a stranger who could neither halt nor
soothe them: why the virtuous young man had left his
wife (several versions of this, all with a tinge of McFad-
54 INTRODUCTION

den-Hollywood phoniness). Why the much-painted, no-

longer-young woman was not what she seemed to be and
probably was. How the elderly notion salesman had been
reduced to hitch-hiking.
My notebooks are full of these confidences. Some of
them were so laden with genuine pain that the back of
my head aches when I think of them. Most of them the
blind and butchered lives, the pitiful prides, the empty
hatreds had best be covered with silence. The civilization
must be pretty bad if it yields such a crop of horrors to
any traveler who cares to gather it.
Incidentally, although I was repeatedly warned against
picking up hitch-hikers, I found them to be the most harm-
less of people, who rarely offended and were frequently

most considerate and helpful. This was true even of the

two or three who, I suspected, might be small-time crimi-
nals. Most of them were just workmen looking vainly for

work, and they had, I thought, a right to a ride with any-

body going their way.

Driving at night through a deluge, south from Seattle,

I was stopped by a hatless, coatless, and bedraggled young
man who promptly offered to pay me for taking him the

seventy-five miles he had to go. Why was he in such a

hurry, I asked? Why didn't he put up for the night some-
where, or at least stay in a filling station until it stopped
raining?
The faucet of his mind was wide open and the story
came out with a rush. Himself was evidently a subject he
thought about a great deal, and with deep earnestness. He
had graduated from high school in 1930 and was promised
a position in the apprentice school of a large engineering
 I 'HukRiED Too MUCH 55

corporation. But when the depression deepened this offer

was postponed indefinitely. He had made a bare living
doing minor electrical repairing and somehow had man-
aged to get himself married. The girl was young and
spoiled. She had become attached to a friend
of his whom

they had taken in as a boarder. She had left him and gone
to live, extraordinarily enough, with the parents of the
false friend, while he had retired to a remote shack in
the woods, rented for twenty dollars a year.
He still loved his wife. He had just come from visiting

her, had tried vainly to persuade her to return to him.

She had needed a new dress and he had given her almost
all his money, including the bus fare he had hoped to

reserve for himself. Then he had started back on foot, at

night, and in the rain.

Hadn't he had enough of it, I asked? Surely, there were
other women. No, not for him, he assured me, and he
recited the litany of the virtues he had been taught and
had always striven to cultivate. He had been hungry, he
said, but had never asked for relief. Would he have a ciga-
rette? No, he didn't smoke. A drink, then, to quiet his
shivering? No, he didn't drink.
We reached the town where he was to leave me and
either walk or obtain a ride twenty miles farther on a side
road. It was still raining. It was late December and he
had neither overcoat nor hat. He looked hungry.
I invited him to have dinner with me. He declined.

Why? Had I offended him? No, not at all. He wasn't really

hungry: also he had never begged and didn't intend to
begin. I spent ten minutes vainly trying to persuade him.
When I came out of the restaurant he was still standing
56 INTRODUCTION
in the rain at a stop light, thumbing the passing cars. Per-

haps I am lacking in respect for the traditional virtues,

but thought him rather stupid and humorless. Accord-
I

ing to the Horatio Alger theory, that young man should

be president of the United States some day. But he won't
be, whereas Huey Long might have been.
The next morning I drove for a hundred miles, with
the rain and fogs swirling over the fir country of
still

southern Washington. The young hitch-hiker beside me

was wise, he assured me. He had a wife and two children
somewhere in southern Oregon. He hadn't seen them for
over a year. He guessed they were getting relief. He had
bummed here and there; worked a little in the lumber
camps and on ranches; had never had any difficulty in
picking up a woman when he wanted one. He was con-
sciously irresponsible, full of scabrous braggadocio, and
perhaps almost as much of a knave as he claimed to be.
I didn't like him, but he had the qualities of his defects.

He seemed a little less stupid and bemused than my friend

of the night before.

Often, driving alone across the lonely distances of the

West, the faces and figures of these chance acquaintances
swarmed before my eyes, like gnats in the sun. What pro-
found failure of American life did this drift of human
atoms signify and embody, and to what would it lead?
The West was newer and I felt it more there, but even
east of the Mississippi was much the same. The people
it

had not possessed the landscape, nor had the landscape

possessed them. The balance was indeed broken. Would
the landscape some day reject all these people, all the
 I HURRIED Too MUCH 57

vulgar and unfeeling falsities they had created and per-

mitted, just as it had rebuked and rejected me? Certainly
some profound profanation of the human spirit had oc-
curred, some fundamental dislocation of the natural

ecology. . . .

The Indians, knowing little and feeling much, still

danced to bring rain, to propitiate the offended gods. We

did not dance: we were danced at the end of an electronic
Nor did we pray, perhaps because, having al-
vibration.
lowed our own godhood to be emasculated, we had lost
the power to pray.
LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF THE
UNEMPLOYED
NO TRUCE ON THE COAL AND STEEL FRONT

day the President called for a six months' truce

between capital and labor, I left Washington and
headed west. It was Sunday, the mild Virginia landscape
was yielding to thefirst breath of autumn, and I resolved

not to hurry. Church bells were ringing. The church, I

was sure, would have something to say about that truce.
I was not disappointed. The rector of the Episcopal

church at Aldie had heard of the truce. He had also heard

of planning, and so, he pointed out, had St. Paul. We were
all members of one body. The ideal society exhibits a per-
fect adjustment of its members. Let us do our work in
the station to which we are called. We are not born equal.
That was the Gallic, infidel lie which Thomas Jefferson
had insinuated into the Declaration of Independence. The
unrest of the world caused by the unwillingness of men
is

to do the work for which they are called. All men are
called, but all men are not worthy of their calling.
A few hours later I was driving through the coal towns

of the Alleghenies. The churches were smaller and shab-

bier. Some of them were falling to pieces and it was evi-
dent that their bells would never ring again. Why? I
picked up hitch-hikers and asked them this, but they were
not interested. The silence of the church bells did not
trouble them. It was the mine whistles. Many of them had
61
62 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
stopped blowing altogether, and those that were left blew
infrequently; two or three days a week when the mines
were working, so that comparatively few miners were
called and fewer still were chosen. What good did it do
to ask for a truce between capital and labor, they said?
Coal would still have to fight a losing fight against oil
and electric power. Which meant that the coal operators
would have to fight each other; and the miners would have
to fight the operators; and the union miners would have
to fight the non-union miners; and the rank-and-file miners
would have to fight both their leaders and Mr. Roosevelt's
peace emissaries. Why did the miners have to fight? Be-
cause most of them didn't have jobs, and those who did
averaged from $500 to $800 a year.

Pennsylvania Was Quiet

Farther west picked up a young miner who was headed
I

for New Kensington to join his father. He had been fired

after the collapse of a strike in a mine near Uniontown.
He hadn't heard about the truce. But he hoped he would
find something like it farther north unless the blacklist
caught up with him.
In Aliquippa, where the Jones & Laughlin Steel Cor-
poration has a big plant, I did find a kind of truce. The
Amalgamated Association of Iron, Tin, and Steel Workers
was holding its meetings in Ambridge, across the river,
because the steel corporation owns Aliquippa all of it,
including the forces of law and order. Aliquippa was
peaceful. It was as quiet as the inside of an ice-box.
Pittsburgh was peaceful too. Steel production in the
 No TRUCE ON THE COAL AND STEEL FRONT 63

Pittsburgh district was down to 17 per cent of capacity;

it

had dropped to 8 per cent two weeks before. Yes, things

were pretty quiet around Pittsburgh. The hearings of the
Steel Labor Board were as orderly as you please. The
Duquesne local of the Amalgamated had asked the board
to compel the Carnegie Steel Corporation to hold an elec-
tion to determine whether or not the Amalgamated was
to represent the workers for purposes of collective bargain-

ing. Counsel for the corporation said

the workers had

already held an election and that 87 per cent of them had

voted for the company union; hence there was no unrest
in Duquesne, and neither the Amalgamated nor the gov-
ernment had any business on the premises.
Steel workers crowded the back part of the court room-

Negroes; heavy-set men with thick

Slavs, Poles, Italians,
forearms and bleak, impassive faces. The eloquent counsel
for the company union (paid by the company) consulted
the records of the company union (furnished by a com-

pany-paid stenographer employed to take down every word

spoken at their meetings) and proved that the
company
union representatives had settled scores of complaints in
favor of the men. Therefore there was no unrest among
the Duquesne steel workers. I saw some of the steel work-
ers smile wryly at this, but none spoke out of turn.
Later some of them took the stand. They proved that
the Amalgamated had signed up a majority of the em-
ployees of the Duquesne plant. Objection by counsel for
the corporation. Employees as of what date? Were they
union members in good standing? It is a nice question.
Is a union member who hasn't paid his dues because the

company has given him only one, two or three days of

64 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
work a week, or who has been fired on one pretext or
another but actually because of union activity is such a
member entitled to participate in an election? What does
the law say?
The steel corporation lawyers clicked and pounded with
the precision of machines. Pale, hawk-like men; men of
steel, not steel workers. Implacable robot functionaries
who had never come closer to an open-hearth furnace than
the bookkeeping entries, red ink entries these days, that

prove everything is impossible: the plants can't be oper-

ated at a profit, they can't be closed without huge losses,
wages can't be increased, a genuine union can't be per-
mitted. They said the Duquesne workers were satisfied,
that the company union was a thing of beauty, and what
if it wasn't? had no jurisdiction on the
the government

premises. Legal hocus-pocus. William J. Spang, speaking

for the Duquesne local of the Amalgamated, was like a
bear caught in a slimed fish net. He did his best, but his
men No unrest? A tall Negro took the stand.
did better.
Yes, he had seen plenty of unrest in Duquesne. He
thumped his chest and his voice boomed:
"I got some of that unrest right here I"
At that the shabby court room came alive and the legal
make-believe blew away like smoke. Suddenly you saw
it as if you were there: the dreary, sodden steel towns; the

vast, sprawling weight of collapsed industry choking the

valleys of the Monongahela, the Allegheny, the Ohio; the
blind, bitter clutch of the steel masters on this clutter of
inert machinery; the aimless drift of harassed, half-starved
men through the streets; the dogged struggle of the union
against a terror that speaks suavely in court, but barks out
 No TRUCE ON THE COAL AND STEEL FRONT 65

of the muzzles of automatics in the walled towns where

steel is made and where, under cover of pious phrases, the

Amalgamated is being whittled and starved and blacklisted

to death.

I went Weirton, West Virginia, shrine of the open

to

shop patriots, while the government, at Wilmington, was

trying to compel Mr. Weir to hold an election of his em-
ployees. The big shots were all away, but everything was
tranquil. This was seen to by eighteen deputy sheriffs, paid
by the company. The local bartender talked out of the side
of his mouth. He didn't know where the headquarters of
the Amalgamated were; he didn't know anything. The
Amalgamated hall was across the street. I talked to a dozen
members of the Weirton local, including the treasurer of
New Deal Lodge No. 33. It was meeting night, but the
hall was far from crowded. With a company spotter stand-
ing outside, or parked across the street, the men are likely
to walk right past the hall rather than into it, even though

they hold cards in the union. (The Amalgamated leaders

claimed to have organized from 80 to 95 per cent of the
Weirton steel workers.)

Things being as quiet as they are, however, the company

union is safer. The company union celebrated Labor Day
by holding a Pageant of All the Nations on Marland
Heights, where the company has built a new swimming
pool. A young,
good-looking Italian member of the Amal-
gamated thought he'd like to see the fireworks life is
pretty dull in Weirton and went up the hill. A hard-
faced man came out from under a bridge, stared at him,
and signaled to another man. A good time was being had
66 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
by allaround the swimming pool, and the fireworks were
beginning to go off. But the youth started walking rapidly
away from there. A shot rang out, and the youth ran.
Shouts, and another shot. As he told the story, I could see
him running head back, elbows up, legs pumping I re-
membered running like that myself during the War. But
this was not war. Things were pretty quiet in Weir ton.
The mile-long steel plant, caged behind sheet metal,
barbed wire, and bullet-scarred concrete, lay stretched out
like some mythical prehistoric monster, along the narrow
shelf between the steep Allegheny foothills and the Ohio.
The monster mustn't die, because then the men who feed
it and nurse it would die; true some of them have died

already and more are likely to die this winter. The Han-
cock County relief director said that relief was insufficient
he was constantly asking for more. Starvation, under its
official euphemisms, malnutrition and the various ills in-

duced by cold and hunger is likely to be a grim fact this

winter in this country of coal, milk, and other surpluses.

In the middle of the fertile corn lands of northwest

Ohio there is a shrine dedicated to no heathenish Goddess
of Fertility, but to the memory ofWarren Gamaliel Hard-
ing. It is small, consisting merely of some immensely heavy
marble columns within which a weeping willow grows
out of a bed of myrtle. It cost a million dollars to build,
and a substantial part of this sum was collected, in pennies,
from American school children. Scores of devout American
men, women and children visit this shrine every day. Per-
sons who underestimate the inertias of the American social
situation should also visit this shrine and feel the immense,
 No TRUCE ok THE COAL AND STEEL FRONT 67

tranquil conviction that roots these noble columns, reared

to the memory of the cat's-paw of the Ohio gang, in the
sod of the American prairie.

They Grow Onions in Hardin County

From Marion we drove to McGuffey, shipping center

for the onion growers of Hardin County. I am told that
the McGuffey who drained this i7,ooo-acre tract of black
alluvial muck land went broke and that the Scioto Land

Company now owns a large share of it. Other big growers

are the New York Coal Company and J. B. Stanbaugh and
Sons. These, with a few others, make up the National
Onion Growers Association, which controls the storage
and most of the shipping from this district. Mr. Stanbaugh
is on the county
relief commission; families get relief to

supplement the ten-cent-an-hour wage they earn working

in his onion fields.
Hardin County is indeed a record-breaking county. It
boasts one of the lowest agricultural wages in the country,
the highest death rate from tuberculosis in the state, very

high infant mortality, and equally notable records with

respect to typhoid, diphtheria, malaria, and dysentery. In
the interest of the truce between capital and labor one
should not stress the connection between the health rec-
ords and the wages paid the imported Kentucky and Ten-
nessee mountaineers who plant, weed, and harvest the
onions. Or the affidavit by a widow to the effect that she
and her two boys, aged eleven and twelve, raised 1,600
bushels of onions and got just $10 for their share. Things
like that should be suppressed, also statements by the
68 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
onion workers that the women and children have been
obliged to crawl on their hands and knees weeding onions,
ten hours, four and a half miles, a day; that the gang
bosses have been known to stamp on the children's hands
to hurry them along.
Indeed, we found things pretty quiet in McGuffey, al-

though about half the strikers were

out, having re-
still

jected the proposed settlement of 15 cents an hour. I

talked to Okey O'Dell, the strike leader who was out on
bail waiting trial for daring to resist and defy his kid-

napers. (The leaders of the mob who kidnaped him were

never indicted.) He is a quiet, gentle Southerner, a bit
huskier and more energetic than the average of his fellows.
He lives alone in his shack now, having sent his wife and
children back to Kentucky to prevent their being kid-

naped, as had been threatened. The shack is better than

most. Out on the marshes whole families were crowded
into single rooms; and after the evictions they slept and
cooked in the roadside ditches. Did not the growers own
all the land?
Onions are cheap in McGuffey, although 40 miles
away in Toledo they sell for 7 cents a pound. The
share-croppers get around a cent a pound for their share,
which they are practically obliged to sell to the Onion
Growers Association. In the store at McGuffey a share-
cropper tried to sell us onions. They were sound white
onions, he said, although not large, on account of the
drought. We said we were not onion buyers, not in the
market, and a strange thing happened. He cried. He
sobbed. Yes, he was a little drunk. He had started getting
drunk three weeks before when his two young children
 No TRUCE ON THE COAL AND STEEL FRONT 69

had died of typhoid. There were half a dozen people in

the store when he said this and they nodded connrmingly.
If he had been very drunk it would not have been so bad.
But he was half sober. And he kept crying louder and
louder, like an animal. He was still crying \vhen we left
the store.
In Kenton, the county seat, the relief director explained
that they had been obliged to cut relief in the onion dis-
trictfrom $2.50 to $2.00 a week for a family of three.
There wasn't enough to go around. If he could get more
from the state, he, Allan Ochs whom the strikers have
charged with flagrant discrimination in the giving of re-
liefwould be only too glad to spend it. Maybe there
would be a tuberculosis sanitarium in Hardin County,
built with PWA money. Maybe the government would
start subsistence homesteads in the muck lands. Mean-
while, I asked, why didn't the county health officer con-
demn those shallow wells? Why didn't he burn those germ-
infested shacks and insist that decent shelter be provided
for the onion workers? But no, that would have been to
break the truce. That would have been war, war against
the feudal lords of Hardin County, who have built fine
solid homes for themselves and their foremen, who have
drilled deep wells to supply their drinking water, who can
look out of their windows and see lines of men, women
and children crawling on hands and knees up and down
the mile-long onion rows. It is a picturesque sight almost
medieval, and right in the heart of America. See America
first.
70 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED

Toledo's Farewell House

In Toledo the windows of the Auto-Lite plant smashed

in the strike a few months before were mended, and busi-
ness was going on as usual. The police of Toledo are

getting paid regularly now and perhaps next time they'll

attack the strikers, which they did not do in the last strike.
I interviewed Edward Lamb, the liberal attorney for the
Auto-Lite workers, and he described grimly a recent at-
tempt to frame him. It appeared, incidentally, that back
of the scenes, and quite apart from the labor struggle, the
automotive manufacturers go right on chiseling each other
and their stockholders with termite-like assiduity there is

no truce in business.
Onthe unemployed front I witnessed only two minor
engagements. Three hundred members of the Single Men's
Protective Union, led by Sam Pollak of the Unemployed

League, marched into the office of the relief administra-

tion demanding and food relief instead of the care
rent

provided in the Toledo shelter, known among the unem-

ployed as "Farewell House." The next day I attended a

demonstration of the Wood County Unemployed League.
Comparing the quality of the two groups I began to under-
stand something of the problem of the unemployed organ-
izers. The flop-house contingent the transients are al-

most impossible to organize. They have dropped too low

in the human scale, have become docile and spiritless.
Ultimately they present no threat, no problem to govern-
ment, except that of disposing of the wreckage of what
were once good workingmen. But Wood County, which is
 No TRUCE ON THE COAL AND STEEL FRONT 71

half agricultural and half industrial you can smell Heinz

ketchup from one end of the county to the other has a
fighting unemployed organization. They still have some
physical and moral stamina; they can resist relief cuts, and
it is important that they do, for if they don't they will have

less energy to fight with next time. But even if they suc-

ceed merely in preserving the status quo they are really

beaten, for the cumulative effect of trying to live on the
meager relief allowance around $20 a month for an av-
erage family in Ohio isbound to be disintegrating.
This is what the truce meant in the relations between
workers and employers, between government and its relief
clients. It didn't look like a truce to me. It looked like
war a quiet, slow, terrible war of attrition.
AMERICA'S FIFTH ESTATE: THE UNEMPLOYED

was part of my journalistic assignment to interview

ITbusiness men, politicians, labor leaders, public officials,
the employed and the unemployed. It did not take me long
to realize that after five years of depression the last-named

category constitutes a new social bloc, a fifth estate in the

capitalist society.
In the cities I sat on the benches outside the offices of
the relief directors whom I was waiting to interview. The
unemployed sat beside me and talked, and I learned a
good deal about the business of being on relief. By the
time I saw the relief director I was usually in a position
to adorn his statistics with a half dozen more or less perti-
nent footnotes.
The relief client is in business, and the relief director
is in business; they are both in business just as much as

the butcher, the baker, or, higher up the line, the banker,
merchant prince or manufacturer. The business of the re-
lief client is first, to get on relief, which in some states

requires the signing of a pauper's oath; also the conceal-

ment of such residual assets of money, property, or solvent
relatives as he may have. Usually, there isnothing or very
little to conceal and that little is ignored by the more
sophisticated investigators for the very sensible reason that
if the client still retains some resources he has that much

72
AMERICA'S FIFTH ESTATE: THE UNEMPLOYED 73

better chance of ultimately getting a job, so that the case

may be "closed." But in theory, of course, the relief client

ischeating the state unless he is utterly broke, hungry and
ragged, and the relief scale in every community I visited
iscalculated to keep him and his family in precisely that
condition. If that statement seems extreme, I point out
that its truth is acknowledged in the published
officially
statements of both federal and state relief officials. If it
is true in New York City, where in June, 1935, the relief

scale for a family of four was around fifty dollars a month,

how much more true is it in Ohio, where the budgetary
allowance is less than half that, or in some of the rural
counties of the South where the figure is again halved.

Again, the theory is that the physical and moral discom-

forts incident to semi-starvation will stimulate the energy
of the relief client in looking for a job. Actually, these
discomforts are sufficiently debilitating so that the effect
is
quite opposite, not always, but usually. The residual
energy of the client is likely to be directed less toward get-
ting a new job than toward improving his present job,
which is that of being on relief.
In Toledo I talked to a workman in his twenties who
estimated that the business of being on relief took up
about half of his time. His present errand at the relief
was to get his oil stove repaired. It was his third trip
office

and he estimated that before all the necessary red tape had
been unwound he would have spent at least three full days
and walked about eight miles. Next week it would be
something else.

"I figure," said this man, "that if I could get me a job

74 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
even at eight dollars a week we'd be better off and I
wouldn't have to walk so much."
This man had been on relief only, a few weeks. In a few
months, I reflected, he would be better "adjusted" to the

business of being on relief. He would keep business hours

on the porch of his home, and when the relief investigator
called,he would put his hands on his hips and say, "Well,
my what can I do for you today?" this being the
dear,
greeting which a relief investigator told me she had re-
ceived from a veteran client.
Therelief investigator is also in business; her job is to

keep her clients she has from fifty to a hundred to take

care of out of the office. Her success in this respect is the
chief measure of her efficiency. To this end she devotes
all her resources of tact to explaining the inexplicable

contradiction between the official minimum subsistence

budget and the amount the client gets in cash or food
orders every two weeks, and in answering the unanswer-
able questions regarding what the client is to do about
clothes, about the rent, about John's rupture, about the

baby's need of more fresh milk. She is responsible to her

supervisor who responsible to the county relief director,
is

who is
responsible to the state Emergency Relief Adminis-
trations, who
are responsible, since all the states receive

varying percentages of Federal aid, to Mr. Hopkins' office

in Washington. There is, of course, much businesslike
bluffing, trading and compromising all up and down the
line.
The relief business is also in competition with "legiti-
mate" business, for example, the business of berry rais-
as,

ing in south Jersey, where corporations so engaged paid

AMERICA'S FIFTH ESTATE: THE UNEMPLOYED 75
and housed their workers so miserably that the relief
clients in the Jersey cities, w.here the relief scale is rela-

tively high, refused to take the jobs offered during the

berry-picking season. The result was that thousands of
dollars of berries rotted on the vines. Iencountered similar
competition all across the continent wherever the minima
of the relief program impinged upon local conditions of

agricultural or industrial peonage.

The issue of such conflicts depends upon the backbone
of the local relief administrator as affected by the pressures
the local employers are able to bring to bear. Where, as in
Hardin County, Ohio, and elsewhere, the employers and
the relief administration are substantially identical, relief
is used to subsidize the
employers' business and the power
to give or to withhold relief is strikes. Mr.
used to break
Hopkins' office recognizes this tendency and combats it,
but not always successfully. In North Carolina, for exam-
ple, relief clients were told to pick strawberries at 35 cents
a day, or be stricken from the relief rolls.
There is at least one other contender in this business-
like arena. Itis the various organizations of the unem-

ployed, such as the Ohio Unemployed League, affiliated

with the National Unemployed League, and led by the
Workers Party. The Unemployed League competes with
the relief investigators, supervisors, and directors for the
allegiance of the unemployed. A
"good" member of the
Fifth Estate will have nothing to do with the League, just
as a "good nigger" in the South will have nothing to do
with the Communist Party or with the Southern Tenant
Farmers Union, organized by the Socialists. But if the
virtue of the "good" relief client goes unrewarded, as is
76 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
likely to happen; if his family faces eviction and the Un-
employed League Grievance Committee tells him it can
force the relief bureau to give him rent money, or if not,
that the League will stop the eviction anyway, then he is

likely to join the League. The Grievance Committee then

eithermakes good on its promises or fails to make good.
Ifthe former, the member of the Fifth Estate may even
pay his dues of 5 cents a month. But his loyalty is un-
stable, since he
is subject to the
salesmanship of the relief
investigator, the security of whose job depends on her not
having too many "tough" clients. She therefore uses what-
ever psychological and material persuasions she can com-
mand to mollify this toughness. Even if her sympathies
are with the relief clients, as often happens, she is a servant
of the state, engaged in the protection of property, and her
chief enemy is the Grievance Committee of the local un-
employed organization.
The
experience of the unemployed organizations is al-
ways and everywhere pretty much the same. The turnover
of membership is high and the total membership fluctuates
widely. A cut in the relief rate or a threat of such a cut is

usually followed by an accession of new memberships; but

if the unemployed organization
protests successfully so that
the cut restored or the threatened cut suspended, then
is

membership drops again, and dues are unpaid.

However, works both ways. Although the unemployed
it

organization likely to lose much of its temporary "float-

is

ing" membership, once a particular victory is won, a frac-

tion of the gains are kept, and the morale of the fighting
units is stepped up. It is not the petty bourgeois "morale"
that social workers strive to inculcate, but a militant work-
 AMERICA'S FIFTH ESTATE: THE UNEMPLOYED 77

ing class morale, and as I observed it, far sounder and

healthier than anything dreamed of in the average social
worker's philosophy. I saw homeless, empty-bellied work-
ers fighting bitterly to aid, not themselves, but their fel-
lows. I saw here and there the stirring beginnings of a

working class fellowship, a working class culture which

within itself exhibited far more of the primary virtues of
honesty, fortitude, generosity and devotion than the bour-
geois culture from which the militant unemployed work-
ers had seceded.
In the philosophy of the American Federation of Labor,
the business of being unemployed is not a craft, and is
therefore not subject to organization. In more practical
terms, the Fifth Estate is a shifting category of the desti-
tute who can pay little or no dues, so that organizing them
can scarcely be regarded as a practical or profitable busi-
ness.Hence it was left to the Communist Party, the Social-
istParty, and the Workers Party to do what little has
been done to organize this crucial sector of the American
working population. The difficulties of the job can scarcely
be exaggerated. Where the ordinary labor union confronts
the individual employer, plus, of course, his Chamber of
Commerce, trade association, publishing, police and court
allies, the
unemployed organization is fighting the state
power directly. A strike of employed workers or even the
threat of a strike, properly timed, can cause serious
if

losses to the employers and so force concessions. But a

strike of work relief clients runs directly afoul of the gov-
ernment.
The unemployed unions apply the principle of col-
lective bargaining too, but with a difference. In the nature
78 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
of the case such unions are industrial, federal, and com-
mitted to revolutionary objectives. Whereas an economic
equilibrium based on the collective bargaining of labor
unions versus employers and employers' associations is con-
ceivable (if one ignores the growing contradiction between

production and consumption embodied in the Marxian

concept of surplus value) an economic and social equi-
librium based on the maintenance by the state of a grow-
ing Fifth Estate of the disemployed and the destitute-
such an equilibrium can scarcely be presented to unem-
ployed workers as an objective to fight for. For the Fifth
Estate, at least, there is quite evidently no salvation within
the framework of our present social order, since "recovery"
to the 1925-27 or even the 1929 level would not eliminate
the unemployed category.
Theexperience of the past year would indicate that a
strike of employed workers can scarcely be won without
the neutralization, or better, the activization of this Fifth
Estate of the unemployed. The Toledo Auto-Lite strike
and the Minneapolis truck drivers' strike are good exam-
ples of the successful fusion of the employed and the un-
employed in a unified strike strategy.
Probably a successful fusion of the employed and the
unemployed on a national scale will never be possible
short of a revolutionary situation: the workers would then
be in a position to take over the state power. Long before
that time arrives, however, we shall see the development
of many local so-called "revolutionary situations," neces-

sarily abortive by reason of their local and transitory char-

acter; also, and more or less coincidentally, the develop-
AMERICA'S FIFTH ESTATE: THE UNEMPLOYED 79
ment On
of fascist or quasi-fascist repressive activities. an
earlier trip in April of 1934, I had seen the premonitory
outline of such a situation in Meigs County, Ohio, about
ten days before the Toledo strike.
 6
THE FIFTH ESTATE IN ACTION

the early years of the last century, long barges,

INequipped only with sweeps, floated the produce of the
early settlements down the Ohio River to the Mississippi
and to the Gulf. At infrequent intervals the boatmen
would pass clearings running down to the river and wave
greetings to the lonely, hard-bitten pioneers who stood on
the banks.
The river traffic is steam-powered now, and the settle-
ments are almost continuous. But the descendants of the
pioneers still stand on the banks and wave, and strangely
enough, their isolation is deeper and more tragic than
that of their forefathers. The pioneers conquered the wil-
derness; they dispossessed the Indians; they destroyed the
forest it was their foe; they trapped and shot the game;

they laid bare the top-soil and plowed it, and much of it
washed down the river to the Gulf. Coming up the Mis-

sissippi to New Orleans, I saw big dredges pumping that

top-soil out of the ship channel. But underneath the top-
Ohio pioneers found coal, and some of them
soil those

became rich; they disemboweled the steep hills all the

way from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi.
The pioneers were not idealists. They were simple,
rough, land-greedy men. The wilderness was their foe and
they fought it, to make their bread, to feed their families.
80
 THE FIFTH ESTATE IN ACTION 81

They did not dream that in the brief cycle of a century

their descendants would be fighting in a new, man-created
wilderness.
The descendants of those Ohio pioneers are not ideal-
They are simple, rough, vigorous men, fighting to
ists.

make their bread, to feed their families. They are strug-

gling to tear from their throats the writhing tentacles of an
obsolete, stricken economy of industrial capitalism which
for at least two decades has failed to feed them enough;
which has starved them when they remained passive;
which has beaten, shot, and jailed them when they re-
volted; which since 1929 has pinched their bellies beyond
human endurance.
Coal production in southern Ohio was down to 20 per
cent of capacity when I was there. For years the produc-
tion of bituminous coal has provided one of the most

tragic surpluses ofour "surplus economy": surplus coal,

surplus machinery; stranded capital, stranded men, women
and children, stranded and paralyzed local governments.

In 1776, when the founding fathers raised the flag of

revolution, it was not at first the Stars and Stripes, but a
crude, violent piece of agitational bunting: the native
rattlesnake, coiled ready to strike, and with a motto:
"Don't Tread on Me." In the summer of 1933 a demon-
stration of the Ohio Unemployed League occupied for
two days the grounds of the state capitol at Columbus.
Over the balcony of the state house the thin-bellied coal-
diggers, steel workers, and farmers flung that same crude,
violent, rattlesnake flag. And a year later Louis Budenz,

stormy petrel of the radical labor movement, carried that

82 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
flag, the flag of Patrick Henry and John Paul Jones, at the
head of the huge picket line that besieged the Auto-Lite

plant in Toledo.
"Peaceful persuasion, persuasion!" shouted
peaceful
Budenz. "Photograph that man!" The scab who tried to
break through the picket lines was photographed with a
brick, a circumstance which greatly distressed the Nice
Nellies of the liberal press.

was about ten days before the bricks started flying in

It

Toledo that I accompanied Budenz, who was one of the or-

ganizers of the Ohio Unemployed League, on a hurry call

to Pomeroy, county seat of Meigs County. FERA had taken
over the CWA
projects, and the relief administrator,
headed by the adjutant general of the National Guard, had
attempted to reduce the wage scale from 50 cents an hour
to 40 and in some counties 30 cents an hour. In eleven
counties, the Leagues had struck and more or less com-
pletely tied up the local FERA projects.
What had happened in Pomeroy was more or less typi-
cal. The Sheriff of Meigs County had stood on the porch

of the white-pillared city hall, read the riot act, and

ordered the members of the Meigs County Unemployed
League to cease, desist, disperse, etc. Whereat his neigh-
bors and former friends, the unemployed miners who con-
stituted the League, had spat vigorously, told the Sheriff
not to be a damned fool, and warned the Sheriff's hastily

improvised posse of deputies not to push them around.

They had assembled had been their custom,
peacefully, as
in front of the city hall, and they would depart peace-

fully, but they wouldn't stand any nonsense from the

 THE FIFTH ESTATE IN ACTION 83

alleged ex-bootleggers and other riff-raff on whom the

Sheriff had pinned deputy badges. Moreover, they re-
marked, the Sheriff must know he wouldn't stand a ghost
of a chance when he stood for reelection next November.
The Sheriff knew, but he had his orders, and he jailed
the leading members of the League, including its Griev-
ance Committee.
The substance of this information had been telephoned
to the headquarters of the Ohio Unemployed League in
Columbus where I happened to be at the time, and it was
suggested that as a traveling journalist I might learn some-
thing about law and order if I made the trip.
The car, like all the cars used in League business, was
a wreck. Every time we tried to drive it faster than fifteen
miles an hour we had to stop and, mend a tire, so we had
plenty of time to talk. Budenz, who had been educated
in a Jesuit College and trained as a lawyer, had spent a

year of his driving just such a car from town to town

life

organizing the League; sleeping in fire houses in winter

and in the open fields in summer. He was beginning to
pay the price of this effort. He had a violent headache and
talked to quiet the throb of his inflamed sinuses. He talked
about Moses, brilliantly and continuously. By the time we
had traveled a hundred and fifty miles he had achieved a
fascinating and convincing reconstruction of the Old Tes-
tament legend in terms of the Marxian class struggle.
Bricks without straw obviously nothing but the business-
like Pharaoh's "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency"
from industry. The sojourn in the desert clearly Moses*
planned method of weeding out kulaks, labor fakers, and
other bourgeois-minded individuals and conditioning a
84 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
new generation of Israelites in terms of a collectivized
social psychology.
In Pomeroy I saw the Sheriff, a minor relief official,
the rather unimpressive optometrist-politician who headed
the county Board of Supervisors, and other constituted
authorities. I also interviewed members Un-
of the Meigs

employed League, both in Pomeroy and later in

Columbus,
and I came to a somewhat surprising conclusion. It seemed
to me that the official government of Meigs County was

distinctly inferior in brains, character, and humanity to

the unofficial government which these starving miners
had created for themselves in the form of the Unemployed
League. The official government represented ownership
and its functionaries were chiefly middle-class people. The
unofficial government represented labor out of a job and
itsfunctionaries, the officers of the League, looked better,
thought better and acted better than anybody else I saw
in Meigs County. As a matter
of fact, this unofficial gov-
ernment had been supplementing the inadequacies of the
officialgovernment for some time past, so that when the
officialgovernment in the person of the Sheriff read the
riot act and put the unofficial government in jail the con-
stituted authorities permitted some rather unfortunate

things to happen.

Jim Bowen had reason to know, better than most, the

incompetence of the constituted authorities. He couldn't

afford to die any more than he could afford to live. And
ifhe had to die, he certainly should have had more sense
than to choose, as his moment for passing, the day the
Sheriff jailed the Grievance Committee of the League.
 THE FIFTH ESTATE IN ACTION 85

Because what happened was that Jim Bowen lay dead in

his bed for four days while the constituted authorities
marked time, and the demoralized forces of the League
struggled frantically to get him buried. The town allowed
$25 for the funeral, but that didn't do much good, be-
cause Jim's family couldn't provide a burial plot in the
town cemetery. And the undertaker required $20 in ad-
vance before he would move the body.
So nothing much happened, except that what was left
ofJim began to smell, and the members of the League
who sat up with the corpse had to move into the next
room.
On
the fourth day, the members of the Grievance Com-
mittee were released from jail, and after much telegraph-
ing, a relative of the family donated a spot of burial
ground four miles from Pomeroy. Everybody was pretty
much upset by this time, so the members of the League
dug the grave in the wrong spot and then had to dig an-
other one. But the undertaker moved the body at last, and
Jim Bowen got the good rest the doctor had so often
recommended, but which Jim couldn't afford. He'd hung
on as long as he could, because it costs more to die out-
right in Meigs County than it does to starve to death de-
cently and gradually. In May, 1934, the budgetary allow-
ance was only $3.50 a week for a family of five, that being
a generous increase over the earlier schedule of 75 cents
a week for adults and 25 cents a week for children.
People die trying to eat those statistics. They die in
America, just as they die in China. And what they die of
is starvation and despair.
Not officially, of course. Officially, Jim Bowen died of
86 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
dropsy and heart trouble. But it seemed to me that the
officialrecords needed amplification in this case, so before
I left I saw that a series of affidavits went to Washington,

and I kept copies for my files. Washington had the sta-

tistics already, I was sure; but I thought Washington, or
the President, or somebody beside that blustering, worried
Sheriff and that frozen-faced optometrist would be inter-
ested in knowing what came of the attempt to eat those
statistics. Here are some extracts:

James Bowen, a member of the Meigs County Chapter of

the Ohio Unemployed League, appeared at a regular meeting
of the Chapter, and told the Grievance Committee, of which

Raymond Smith, of Pomeroy, is chairman, that Mrs. Bowen

had borne a child, that the child had died shortly after birth,
that he had no sheets with which to change the bed, and that
there was nothing to eat in the house. The Grievance Com-
mittee was unable to find Henry Corradini, the Pomeroy Re-
lief Commissioner, but found Walter Compton, one of the
three county Commissioners. Mr. Compton, after some delay,

got hold of Mrs. N. G. Swain, the local case administrator.

Mrs. Swain secured an order for sheets and an order for
groceries. Dr.
Manning Daniels of Pomeroy delivered the child
and informed Mr. Bowen that the baby could not live; it is
my belief and was the belief of Mr. Bowen that the child had
no chance of living because the mother had not had enough
to eat during the period of pregnancy. During the pregnancy
of his wife, Mr. Bowen had been ill with heart trouble and
dropsy, but had done some CWA and FERA work in spite of
his condition, in order to get some food for the family, consist-
ing of himself, his wife, and a fourteen-year-old boy.
After the death of his child Mr. Bowen's health became
 THE FIFTH ESTATE IN ACTION 87

worse. He had difficulty in securing medical attention because

the local doctors at that time had not been paid for services

rendered in behalf of the Relief Administration. On the eve-

ning of May 3, the Grievance Committee of the League re-

ported that Bowen was fatally ill and wanted

a doctor. I called

up Dr. Daniels and was informed by him that the local doctors
were then holding a meeting and had practically decided that
relief patients until they had
more
they would not attend any
been paid for past services
by the Relief Administration; Dr.
Daniels said that three months' bills were overdue; he said that
Mr. Bowen was dying and that he could not be helped; that
he, Dr. Daniels, had been so informed by Dr. Ellis, the local
health officer who had attended Bowen and given him treat-
ment of which he, Dr. Daniels, approved; that but for this
circumstance, he, Dr. Daniels, would have been willing to

visit Bowen out of consideration for the League's request.

Bowen died early on the morning of May 7. Raymond Smith,

chairman of the Grievance Committee of the League, assumed
responsibility for making burial arrangements, and sent a tele-
gram to relatives of Bowen. That morning Smith, with eight
other members of the League, was arrested following a meet-

ing in the city hall, charged with incitement to riot.

This affidavit, which is confirmed by others, is signed

by Clyde Brickies of Pomeroy. The rest of the story of

Jim Bowen has been told.

After I went up the gulch along a nar-
saw the Sheriff I

row mine
road that skirted the dumps and found a mem-
ber of the Grievance Committee concerning whom the
Sheriff had warned me: he was a bad fellow; he had stolen,
been arrested, and received a suspended sentence.
88 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
All this was true; the man admitted it. He had stolen
some dynamite with which to blast the stumps out of a
patch of hillside, which might, he thought, grow some
corn. He had stolen some automobile tires he needed for
his ancient car he had to have a car if he was to pick up
such odd jobs as were available around the township. He
had stolen very little, and only what he had to have; you
can't make bricks without straw. He and his old mother
had been getting weaker and weaker on the relief diet of
gravy and potlikker, and he felt that he had to help him-
self somehow.

The old mother didn't approve of this extra-legal self-

help. I made notes to the accompaniment of her lamenta-
tions. The family had always been respectable, she said.
Nothing could say convinced her that, under the circum-
I

stances, the effort of her son to help himself, coupled as it

was with continuous efforts to help others, was not merely
excusable, but represented a creditable and respectable
exhibition of manhood. . . .

was past midnight when we got back to Columbus,

It

but lights were still burning in the headquarters of the

Ohio Unemployed League the ancient brick building
which represents the unofficial capitol of Ohio's Fifth
Estate. I found the Secretary contemplating gloomily a

pile of mimeographed letters. The last nickels had gone

for mimeograph ink, and there was nothing left to buy

postage; also, since gasoline money was scarce, how was

he going to get to the important conference he had
called? . . . Well, he had hitch-hiked before.
I talked about Meigs County. Yes, it was bad. A dozen
other counties were just as bad. What would happen? He
 THE FIFTH ESTATE IN ACTION 89

didn't know.Toledo had blown up, as expected, and the

League had plenty to worry about in Lucas County alone.
Because of the relative militancy of the Unemployed
League leadership and the experience and ability of its
overworked organizers scores of strikes of employed work-
ers both in Ohio and elsewhere have been virtually led
and frequently won by the unemployed allies of the
strikers.
In the great textile North Carolina Unem-
strike, the

ployed League formed the "flying squadrons" and in

some sections closed down as many shops as did the union.
The building trades workers, the pottery workers, the
garment workers in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and else-
where, the miners have all formed working alliances for
joint action with local unemployed units.
Probably the most outstanding accomplishment of the
Ohio Unemployed League was its success for a long period
in 1933 and 1934 in stopping practically all evictions of

unemployed in the city of Columbus. This struggle was

climaxed by a street riot in which the police charged
into a "street home" which the League members had set

up by way of dramatizing the plight of the unemployed.

CWA, FERA, and now WPA-all the alphabetical re-
lief measures of the New Deal have been greeted with
strikes. Because of the WPA's definite attack upon the
wage standards of the employed, itwould seem likely that
the alliance of organized labor and the various unem-
ployed organizations will be strengthened by the Presi-
dent's latest measure.
 YOWZIR: AN EPISODE

the time I reached Ohio I had begun

to experience
BY a certain amount of shell-shock, incident to my sev-
eral encounters with the chaotic conflicts embodied in Mr.
Roosevelt's truce. I felt neither young nor bitter, but a
little old, and
need of some of that irrational, militant
in

optimism with which youth is supposed to fortify the

flagging energies of age. Accordingly, I accepted with
alacrity when a liberal professor at one of Ohio's numerous
denominational colleges suggested that I visit his campus
and talk to his students. This was feasible, first because
my radical reputation was fortunately obscure, and second,
because the president and faculty of this particular col-
lege, while predominantly conservative, were militant de-
fenders of the principles of academic freedom.
It was after nine o'clock in the evening when I arrived
at the professor's house, where I was greeted by a small
group of the more radically minded students and instruc-
tors. They were cordial and intelligent but I confess I was
a little dashed by the impersonal, debating society manner
they employed in discussing matters of the most profound
personal import, not so much to me, but to them. They
knew that most of them were going to graduate into un-
employment, or at best into wretchedly ill-paid, insecure,
and uncreative jobs. The debris of the depression was all
90
 YOWZIR: AN EPISODE 91

about them; a short distance from the campus, relief work-

ers were making chairs in one of the idle factories taken
over by Ohio Production Units, Inc.; a big herd of drought
cattle was pastured just outside the town; a few months
before the Unemployed League in Columbus had been
stopping evictions and fighting pitched battles with the
police, and shortly afterward the Auto-Lite strike had
blown Toledo wide open. But most of them not all, there
were two or three exceptions viewed all these phenomena
with a detached equanimity that both repelled and fright-
ened me. They could not seem to understand that I and
other radicals and even liberals who do not feel that they
can afford to be tired, turned with a hope akin to despera-
tion to the youth of the colleges for the fresh courage and

vitality,the tough rebelliousness needed to take over the

civilization and shape it creatively.
I was stupid to expect anything of the sort, of course.
I had lost the perspective of my own college days. The
next morning I regained some of it, for I saw them en
masse nearly fifteen hundred students assembled for the
morning chapel exercises. They were indeed marvelously

young, healthy and good-looking; dozens and scores of

beautiful girls and handsome, athletic boys. They were
thrilling to look at, and I suppose they would have driven
me mad if I had had the job of trying to teach them.
Young white Indians, quite unaware that the hunting
ground of the American middle class is ravaged, that the
circle of exploitative privilege is steadily contracting, that
the subsidies available for the arts and sciences are wither-

ing; that the old world is dying, and the birth of the new
a matter for hope rather than assurance.
92 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
A week later I was driving out of Toledo en route to
Detroit. Soon I sighted a small, dapper figure with a brief
case, a bag, and a business-like thumb. It turned out to be
a collegian, or rather, a college graduate with a B.A., a
profession, and even a philosophy of life.
"Where do you want to go to Detroit?" I asked.
"Yowzirl" he replied with enthusiasm, and proffered me
a monogrammed cigarette case.
He was about five feet three, I judged; rather daintily
built, but not effeminate; the features small, the eyes
thoughtless, incurious, and yet somehow sharp; the clothes
neat, distinctly collegiate, but not extreme.
After exchanging briefly the usual amenities of the road,
I proceeded to find out about him. He was the son of a

carpenter in a middle-western town. His lower-middle-

class mother had sweated and sacrificed to put him through

high school and college; she had wanted him to become,

not a carpenter, but a "gentleman": a doctor, lawyer, or
at the very least an accountant or minor business execu-
tive. He had "made" the less swanky fraternities in both
high school and college; he had participated ardently in
the extra-curricular activitieshad managed teams and
business-managed school publications. During vacations he
had made a little money at what was to become, after
graduation, his profession.
What wasthat profession? He was a "culture-bearer."
He didn't say that, of course. What he said was that he
traveled from city to city selling block subscriptions for
McGladden publications: Blue Romances, Stewed Stories,
Flicker Fancies, and Fraternity or was it Equality?
1 was greatly interested. Where had he been? How had
 Y6wziR: AN EPISODE 93
he found business? Who read the McGladden publica-
tions? I was familiar, as who is not, with the promotion

advertising of these publications. According to their circu-

lation manager they are read by the Sweeneys: the sub-
stantial working people of America, men, women and
children. It is the Sweeneys, or so runs the argument, who
do the bulk of the buying, and it is the Sweeneys that you
must advertise to if you have developed a new, low-priced
household gadget, or a new beauty aid, or a new packaged
corruption of the natural virtues of wheat and corn. There
are an astonishing number of Sweeneys, it appears, and
their virtues are both massive and readily exploitable.
Yowzir, who appeared to be fairly shrewd about his
business, gave me some interesting data about who these
Sweeneys are, where they are located, and how you catch
them. Many of them were workmen and workmen's wives
and daughters. But many more of them, most of them in
fact, were white-collar workers, especially typists and shop

girls.
This was indicated by the relative state of the market in
Washington, averred Yowzir, was a Lulu,
different cities.
because of its huge concentration of white-collar workers.
The Brain Trust had indeed been a godsend to McGlad-
den. In the intervals of typing the variegated and kaleido-

scopic "plans" spawned by the New Deal secretariat, the

stenographers extracted copies of Blue Romances and
Psychical Culture from their desks and devoured them
passionately. They paid for these publications on the in-
stallment plan, being hounded thereto by Yowzir and his
ilk.

Washington was marvelous; Columbus had been pretty

94 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
good. All the state capitals, in fact, were likely hunting
grounds for the McGladden boys. Detroit, he thought,
would be fair because of its heavily staffed relief apparatus.
What you steered clear of was the broke industrial towns,
and especially the slum districts of these towns. The real

poor didn't read McGladden publications. They didn't

read anything except an occasional newspaper. This was
especially true since the depression. It appeared, in fact,
that because of the withering of the market, McGladden,
like any other manufacturer of merchantable commodities,
was engaged in trading up into the middle class; there was
still some money and still some interest in romance left

there; none in the segregated Fifth Estate of the unem-

ployed.
Wasit
profitable business, I asked.
Not
so good. His commissions sounded extravagant, but

they were eaten up by travel, even though this was subsi-

dized by passing motorists. Occasionally he had to write
home for the carpenter usually came through,
money and
although he didn't have much work now; he was getting
old. (So the carpenter also subsidized McGladden, I re-
flected, being doubtless rewarded by the sense of having
made a vicarious sacrifice in the interest of culture. Also
the state, which had educated the carpenter's son.)
I did not wish to think badly of Yowzir. After all, he

had been to college. Maybe this profession of his was just

a survival expedient, like stealing fruit or picking up coal
along the tracks. Did he like the McGladden publications,
I asked? Did he read them?
"Yowzir, I'll tell the world I read them. They're some
swell books. Wait a momentl"
 YOWZIR: AN EPISODE 95

Helpless to prevent him, I watched while he opened

his suitcase, extracted samples of all the McGladden publi-
cations, and presented them to me.
My gorge was steadily rising, but there was still some-
thing to be learned from Yowzir, and I hung grimly to my
task.
What did his college professors think of the McGladden
publications, I asked. They had never mentioned them,
but that was different. You read only classical authors in
college Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, Hugo, Washington
Irving. It was all pretty dead stuff, but he had worked hard
and got C's in his courses. The McGladden publications
were something else again; you got a kick out of reading
them snappy, up-to-date stuff.

I continued to explore his academic past. He had studied

French, but couldn't speak a word of French and aside
from the required reading in his courses, had never read
a book in French. He had
displayed some talent for me-
chanical drawing, but hadn't followed it up there was no
money in that.
Enough of Yowzir as student, I reflected. What about his
personal life? Casually, I asked him what he did for women
on the road.
Immediately that extraordinarily trivial face assumed
an expression of wise and sophisticated virtue. He never
went with prostitutes, he assured me. He would not
lower himself, aside from the chances of infection. Any-
way, if you used your head, you didn't have to pay for
it. There was
usually some hot baby in one of the offices
he visited who, if you went about it rightly, would be
willing to lift a skirt for a friend.
96 LABOR AND THE TEMPER OF UNEMPLOYED
I almost hit a post that time. The little pimp! So he

was subsidized at that point too, was he? He didn't even

have the grace to pay for his sexual pleasures. I studied his
face, and if there was an atom of decent humanity in it, I
was unable to see it.
I had one more question, however. What did he think

of the prospects of business recovery? What was the world

coming to anyway?
should have asked him that sooner, for when he an-
I

swered, I saw that he esteemed himself to be something

of an authority. He drew a few grave puffs on his cigarette
and then issued his
pronouncement.
"Buddy," he "I'm telling you things won't get
said,
much better until we have another war. I've traveled all
over this country and that's my judgment. A war would
straighten us out in no time. Everybody'd have jobs there
wouldn't be any more labor troubles like what they had in
Toledo. And if there were, the troops would put the heat
on those red agitators quick enough. I went to the

R.O.T.C. camp myself this summer, and that's what all

the boys were saying. Yowzirl What this country needs is

another first class war."

The pompous, adolescent voice ceased speaking. I didn't
look at him. had seen enough of him. Suddenly I saw
I

opening ahead an appalling vista. There would be another

war, and this wretched little whippersnapper would be an
officer in the army. He would be giving orders to working

men, men a thousand times his superiors in brains, in

brawn, in character men like those Meigs County miners.

stopped the car in the middle of a deserted stretch
I

of scrubby pine land.

 YOWZIR: AN EPISODE 97

"Get out!" I said.

He hesitated, and I extracted a monkey wrench from

the side pocket of the car.
I left Yowzir standing by the side of the road, his face

contorted with bewilderment and indignation. His mouth

was open, but he hadn't dared to curse after me. . . .

Well, Yowzir was made in America, and America will

have to pay the price of having made him.
DETROIT AND CHICAGO
 8
DETROIT: THE CAPITAL OF MOBILIA

Detroit I heard about a labor journalist who kept

INsome files.

I looked him up and was so delighted when I saw the

impressive size and orderly arrangement of his files that
I plunged into them with scarcely a look at the man who

had put them together. When I came up for air, I saw that
the man himself was even more
interesting than his data.
He was that rare and extremely valuable type a scholar
in the labor movement. Few universities can boast better
research men than instinct and natural aptitude had made
of this patient, bald, fifty-year-old, self-educated sheet-metal
worker. In fact I have seldom seen files that contained less
lumber and more information.
He had news clips concerning all the automotive strikes
for the past three years, and pointed out that many strikes
never made the capitalist newspapers at all. Even after a
big walk-out there was usually a hiatus of two or three
days and then a riot before the employer-dominated De-
troit press would admit that anything had happened.
What had happened since the President's automobile
settlement and the setting-up of the Automotive Labor
Board?
The speed-up and stretch-out had been instituted on a
scale unprecedented in his thirty-year experience of the
101
102 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
industry. Here the data was in the form of letters written

by automotive workers to labor editors, of which I repro-

duce the following specimens:

On the motor assembly line at Ford's, production used to

be 1,300 motors for the day and afternoon shifts. About the
middle of March, when a general strike of the auto industry
seemed about to start, production was cut down to 900, with-
out reducing the working force. For the first time in years we
were able to work almost like normal human beings. Just as
soon as William Collins and the other A. F. of L. officials did
their dirty work in having the strike called off, not only were

many Ford workers sorely disappointed, but Henry himself

felt overjoyed. Production in our department was stepped up

to 1,450 for the two shifts and three workers out of 37 were
laid off.

This, from a Chevrolet worker, is even more enlighten-

ing:

Chevrolet workers got the benefits of the agreement signed

at Washington without any loss of time. On the day the terms
of the settlement were announced, we were speeded up to a
new high record in the axle department, plant no. 3. On that
day we turned out 1,500 jobs instead of the usual 1,000 or
1,100. The fellows are pretty sore about the new wage increase
which is scheduled to go into effect April i. This increase is
going to cut wages for many of us if we go on the 36 hour
week. My own pay check will be minus $3.15.

The following excerpt from another letter by a Chevro-

let worker contributes a macabre detail:

I am
working in department no. 16, the press room, mid-
night shift. We are supposed to use tongs in working on these
 DETROIT: THE CAPITAL OF MOBILIA 103

presses, but they make us use our hands because we can work
faster. If the press repeats, good-by, hands.

This made interesting supplementary reading in con-

nection with the pronouncement of Mr. Alfred P. Sloan,
issued while I was in Detroit, concerning the labor policy
of General Motors. Stripped of its elaborate verbiage, what
Mr. Sloan said was that General Motors intended to stick
to its company union policy. By implication, the statement
meant that the company union would be the weapon
which General Motors would use in fighting both the
unions and government interference under Section 7a.
This was, of course, strictly in line with the Young com-
pany union plan which figured in the hearings before the
National Steel Labor Board which I had attended in Pitts-
burgh.
All the union organizers were driven mad by the dif-

ficulty of injecting the most elementary principles of

unionism into the heads of the migratory Tennessee, Ken-
tucky, and Arkansas mountaineers who, since the depres-
sion, had drifted into Detroit during the production season
and out again when production shut down; they consti-
tuted a tougher nut to crack than the foreign-born Slavs
and the Negroes. Religion was a factor; the mountaineers
were fundamentalists, like many of the native Michigan
farmers who had become automotive workers.
In October, 1934, Michigan carried 700,000 persons on
its relief rolls at a cost of about $6,000,000; that meant that

between 20 and 30 persons were receiving "welfare aid"

for each individualreceiving such aid before 1929.
Seventy-five per cent of this total were unskilled laborers;
104 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
skilled labor accounted for 18 per cent. The relief scale,

although everywhere admittedly inadequate, was relatively

high in Detroit and incredibly low in some of the rural
counties. The upper peninsula of Michigan was described

by competent observers as "one big poor house," with 80

per cent of the population on relief in some of the copper,
iron, and exhausted lumber counties, most of which were
broke before the depression.
It would have taken months of digging to get to the

bottom of this human compost heap. I knew there was a

bottom untouched by union organization, a bottom which
even my labor scholar knew little about. I knew that relief,
wage, and speed-up statistics gave a very inadequate pic-
ture. What was was how these people
really important
lived, loved and died, what they thought and felt, what

they read, what they did with their "leisure."

A woman union organizer supplied a few fragmentary
clews. She came off a picket line, had dinner with us, and
didn't need to confess her state of physical and mental
exhaustion. She told the usual story of unspeakable wage
and work conditions in the restaurant industry, of ubiqui-
tous rackets and intermittent police harassment. What
were her people like? Oh, they were just working girls,

mostly of foreign descent. They were in the automotive

shops when there was work, otherwise anything they could

pick up. How did they manage to live on their wages?

They didn't; some of them hustled a little surprisingly
few and what if they did? What did they read? The sexy
pulps and slicks if anything. Yes, the McGladden sheets.
She gave me some case histories and later I obtained others
from social workers; also some even better ones from bar-
 DETROIT: THE CAPITAL OF MOBILIA 105

tenders, a philosophic race of men, and frequently well-

informed.
In Detroit, more clearly than anywhere else in America,
one sees the bare bones of the cultural nightmare we
Americans have dreamed for ourselves, believing, in our
greedy haste, our barbaric innocence, that it was a thing
we could live by and with; that human life could flourish
as a kind of parasitic attachment to an inhuman, blind,
valueless process, in which money begets machines, ma-
chines beget money, machines beget machines, money be-

gets money.
It was and is a mad notion. Europeans, more sophisti-
cated in the verities of social madness than ourselves, have
given this mad notion a name: Fordismus. Where else in
the world, and what other period of history could a lean,
at

pale, fixed-eyed pioneer mechanic have imposed his rule

of thumb economics, his small-town morality, upon a
whole society? Yet it is easy to see how it happened. When
Mr. Ford and the automobile were young, there was no
organic culture to form and shape him; Ohio was chang-
ing from a natural wilderness to an industrial wilderness
but it was still essentially a boom camp. There was nobody
to wash his ears and make them listen to something beside
himself and the powerful, if mad promptings of his genius,
nothing to slap his ears back and cure him early of Ford-
ismus. So he had his infantile, willful way; he dug the
channel, others followed and helped him, and the final
surge of power back of the American gold-rush flowed
through it. Mr. Ford has had Fordismus all his life. He
will die of it, and I think the society will die of the same

thing.
io6 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
The River Rouge plant is like a mechanically gifted
child's dream of heaven, and every day thousands of wide-

eyed American children of assorted ages, from seven to

seventy, throng the gates of this heaven for to admire and
to see.
These tourists saunter along the platform beside the
assembly before, perhaps, they had
line, just as a week
sauntered along the boardwalk above Niagara Falls. It
is indeed an
equivalent phenomenon. It has almost the
same natural grandeur and human irrelevance. One could
almost smell an acrid, electronic mist arising from the
motors, like the mist that rises above the Falls.
The tourists didn't know each other, or speak to each
other they were the heterogeneous, atomic middle-class
drift of a continent. The workmen who struggled fran-
tically keep up with the implacable crawl of the
to
belt conveyors they too barely knew each other. They
were the labor drift of a continent, here today, gone to-
morrow, unified by no traditional skills or craft disciplines,
a potpourri of races and religions. They were merely the
minimum ingredient of man-power necessary to the manu-
facture of mobility, and as the process of technological
rationalization advanced, they would know less and less
about what they were doing and why. They were a part
of the nightmare and those who watched it were a part
of the nightmare. We are all a part of the nightmare.
Three years ago Diego Rivera waddled along that plat-
form beside the conveyor belt. His half-Spanish, half-
Indian eyes were wide open and not dreaming. He left
the record of what he saw in the Detroit Art Museum, and
a few centuries hence, I
suspect, those frescoes may sup-
 DETROIT: THE CAPITAL OF MOBILIA 107

ply more comprehensible data to the archaeologists than

anything else that will be left of Fordismus. Some of the

tourists alsogo to see the murals. They don't understand
them. They are vaguely worried by the half-concealed arro-
gance of Rivera's knavish ironies, but also, I think, vaguely
soothed by the subtle infection of art. They are exposed
to a reality of a higher order than the materials it uses
and shapes, and unconsciously they are affected.
Detroit specializes in the manufacture of mobility for
the continent indeed for the planet. For all practical

purposes and Detroit respects only practical purposes-

it makes comparatively little else. So that Detroit must
import the other requisites of a culture. Other centers
specialize in some of these things and they are necessary
to the accomplishment of Detroit's appointed task. Holly-
wood specializes in the manufacture of the soothing, nar-
cotic dreams of love, of riches, of powerful, untamed egos
in which the slaves of the assembly line or the punch press
can take refuge from the nightmare of technological mass
production of mobility. In New York, NBC and Columbia
specialize in the manufacture of cheerio radio optimism,
pre-barbaric dance rhythms, and commodity fetishism in-
toned by unctuous announcers. In New York also Mc-
Gladden puts the dream on the printed page, with some
special colorations and perversions of reality, as I discov-
ered when I read the 'books" Yowzir had left in my car.
'

These specialized mass producers of dreams supply the

major unifying coordinates of the American culture. It is
a makeshift, pioneer arrangement, but being in a hurry,
like all pioneers, it was the best we could do; also, it was

good business. (I do not mean to ignore the culture-

io8 DETROIT AND CHICAGO

product of isolated religious sects and old-world communi-

ties, or the vestigial function of the Protestant and Catho-

lic churches as culture-makers and culture-bearers, but

point out that these influences are relatively without force

and effect.) Being good business, the specialization in the
mass-production of a mass-culture, seemed valid per se
was it not demonstrably what the
people wanted? So that
by a specialized, heavily capitalized, highly speculative and
technologically advanced system of dream-manufacture,
we have unified as best we could our big family of pi-
no other unify-
oneers. For the workers, at least, there are

ing bonds except the commonly endured miseries of irreg-

ular a,nd insecure employment, of meaningless, minutely

specialized and frantically speeded-up tasks; of prostitu-

tion, sickness, starvation, and
death. For the privileged
classes, there is participation in the dream and, always,
emulation the cultural equivalent of the accelerating belt
line.
 9
SCHEHERAZADE SWEENEY AND THE
AMBASSADOR

PTT1HE sign back of the bar read:

JL WYZOR ZOMANI ORZIZAZIZ ANZO FUORZIZ.
"It's Polish, isn't it?"

The bartender finished polishing the last glass and re-

garded the stranger tolerantly.

"No, it ain't Polish," he said. "It means, 'We don't cash
"
checks.'
The stranger sighed and put a coin on the bar beside
his glass.
"It's a good check. You know the McGladden publica-
tions Blue Romances, Stewed Stories, Psychical Culture
Magazine'
"Yes, but I don't know you, brother. And even if I did.
Not in this town. Not in Detroit."
The stranger turned to the chunky blonde girl beside
him.
"His honor doesn't know me. Excuse it, Scheherazade.
I'm the ambassador from the Caliph of Moronia to the
Court of St. Mobilia, and he doesn't know me. Come on,
baby, let's go back to the booth. We
gotta have a con-
ference."
"I love nuts," said Scheherazade. "It's my weakness. You
talk swell. I bet you're a writer, or
somethjhg."
109
no DETROIT AND CHICAGO
The ambassador drained his glass. "Something," he said
morosely. "The conference will please come to order.
Business before pleasure. What are you, Scheherazade-
Miss Sweeney, beg your pardon, Scheherazade Sweeney.
I

What were you, I mean, before you were a punch press

operator at Gurnstedt's?"
The ambassador closed his eyes. You could see better
And hear. Detroit is
that way. quiet as a village after mid-
night. Ford's River Rouge plant, Briggs' Body, Fisher
Body all the automotive plants are miles from the center.
And the night life had withered since the depression. A
few dance halls, a movie theater housed in an abandoned
opera house, a few prostitutes drifting in and out of sa-
loons like this one. Half a dozen blocks south there were
none at all. The police kept that part of the town clean.
At the Hotel Statler the Junior League was giving a
Charity Circus.Debutantes riding bareback; General
Motors big shot with a whip taming a Ford big shot as the
lion. Rotarian cut-up as the wild man in the side show.

Perfectly killing and all for charity. Detroit could take it.
We will share.
This sort of thing had gone on, and would go on, the
ambassador reflected, in spite of what happened to the
Detroit banks, in spite of what happened to Detroit real
estate, in spite of what happened to the automotive work-
ers. Itwas going on tonight in spite of all that had hap-
pened during the preceding four years. What had that
big shot in the Fisher building told him? Detroit had lost
about a billion dollars on paper at least. Grass was grow-
ing in the streets of the suburban developments that
sprawled out twenty and thirty miles beyond the city
 SCHEHERAZADE SWEENEY AND AMBASSADOR 111

limits. Grass-grown streets and groggy gateposts; in places

tractors were dragging plows right through the road metal,

plowing up the ground for corn and potatoes. Eighty per

cent of the local architects and construction engineers
were unemployed.
Detroit was withering but was it? Ford was putting up

a new
$5,000,000 addition to his plant. Another group of
automotive capitalists was building a new steel plant em-
bodying new processes, a 50 per cent increase in man-hour
productivity; that would certainly put a crimp in Gary
and Pittsburgh.
This was the capital of Mobilia, a civilization conceived
in motion, built on wheels, and dedicated to the principle
that everything and everybody must move faster and faster.
The machine was the state and the state was the machine;
all power to the turbines, the electric furnaces, the new
photo-electric cell and 'tron contrivances that counted and
sorted, warned, stopped and started, so much more ac-
curately, so much more intelligently than men or women.
Of course, the machine expelled excrement: metal scrap,
paper scrap known as "securities" human scrap known
as theunemployed, of which the capital of Mobilia at the
moment acknowledged 130,000; from twenty to thirty
people were receiving "welfare aid" for every person re-
ceiving such aid in 1929.

A voice cut through this haze of reverie. The ambas-

sador started and rubbed his eyes. Oh, yes, this was one
of them, a constituent of the Caliph, undoubtedly; one
of his readers, one of his spiritual charges. What was she
saying?
112 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
"You're a funny guy. Do you realize you've been sitting
there like a dummy for five minutes? And you ain't tight.
I could tell if you was tight. You ain't half as tight as I am,
even. Come on, big boy, snap out of it."
The ambassador regarded his new acquaintance vaguely.
Peroxide blonde. About thirty. Thick arms. Painted finger-
nails, but heavy callus on right hand. Eyes small, puzzled,
half plaintive, half shrewd the female simian look. Mouth
childish, greedy rather than sensual.
"I'm sorry," said the ambassador. "No, I'm not tight,
Scheherazade. You're a good girl and I like you. You were
going to tell me what you were before you were a punch
press operator at Gurnstedt's."

It was Scheherazade's turn to become dreamy. Head

back, eyes half-closed. The woman of mystery; a burlesque
of a burlesque. One of Cecil DeMille's constituents also,
reflected the ambassador.
"I'm not a good girl. Not now. I got my snootful of
being good. I'm hard now. Men don't fool me any more.
I know them; I get what I want out of them and they get
what I want to give 'em."
She paused. The cigarette hand described sophisticated
circles.

was only sixteen. I fell in love with a fellow in my

"I
home town. I'm a Southern girl. My grandfather stood
with Lee at the surrender." (What, with that face! re-

flected the ambassador.)

"I was ready to do anything for He prom-
this fellow.

ised to marry me. He got my cherry. He knocked me up."

 SCHEHERAZADE SWEENEY AND AMBASSADOR 113

Notprecisely the accepted language of the Caliphate,

reflected the ambassador. But the music was the same.
"Did you have the baby?" he asked gently.
"Yes, and in three weeks that poor baby was dying of

diphtheria. The fellow wouldn't come near me. He

. . .

was scared. He was scared of his folks. I had never drunk

before, but I took two tumblers of moonshine and drank
them straight down. Then I went over to his house and
dragged that fellow out of bed. I said: 'You're going to see
your baby before he dies.' The poor little thing was the
image of his father and I was bound he'd see it.
"I dragged him out of the house and put him in a cab.
When we got there the baby was dying. The fellow fainted
dead away. He went out like a light. I said: I'm going
to make you suffer the way you made me suffer.' He fell

on his knees. He kissed my dress. He said he'd marry me.

He said he'd slave for me."
waitress paused expectantly outside the booth. The
The
ambassador held up two fingers. They were alone in the
cafe by this time. The bartender was yawning. The rumble
of the street was fading. Mobilia was going to bed.
"The baby died, and his people, they done everything
for that child. certainly laid
They him out fine. They give
him a wonderful burial.
"Then I decided I'd make him love me the way he used
to before he knew he'd got me in trouble. He fell for me
again, harder than before. But I was cruel to him. I made
him want me all the time, and then I wouldn't let him.
"He got drunk. He drank more and more so he was
drunk all the time. His mother come to me and begged me
ii4 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
on her knees to save him. I wouldn't. I was hard-hearted.

I said, 'Let him suffer the way he made me suffer/

"Then onenight I went into a joint and found him sit-
ting there drunk. I got soft-hearted. I took care of him.
I nursed him. I kept the liquor away from him and he got

better.When he was well he cried like a baby and begged

me to marry him. I said: 'Don't you ever see me or speak
to me again.'
'

There were circles under the eyes of Scheherazade. The

shoulders drooped. The mouth was tortured. A perfect
close-up.
"Was that all?" murmured the ambassador. "How about
the fellow in Zanesville, the fellow that got you drunk
and married you?"
Scheherazade sat up straight and dropped her cigarette.
"Say, big boy, who do you think you are? You know a
lot, don't you? I thought you was a gentleman. I know mil-
lionaires in this town, personal. And you bet-
know them
ter believe I don't let 'em get fresh with me. I wouldn't
even let them know I'm broke. They buy me a dress for
a party, maybe, but Say, who do you think you are?"
The ambassador pointed to her left hand. "Why do you
wear a ring if you don't want people to know you are
married? Excuse it, Scheherazade, I was just kidding."
"Ohl" The girl glanced at the ring. "Well, I'm not mar-
"
ried now. I just wear that well
"I know, Scheherazade. You wear it to keep fresh guys
like me in their place. Don't get sore. Come on, your drink
is waiting for you."
The girl hesitated, then drank. "Well, it wasn't Zanes-
ville, wise guy. It was Lima. But he did get me drunk. I
 SCHEHERAZADE SWEENEY AND AMBASSADOR 115

didn't want marry him. But he had a license and he

to

got me drunk, and he was drunk, and we was married.

"Do you know how long that marriage lasted? Nine
weeks. I worked and he worked. I made $15 a week. We
had as nice an apartment as you ever seen, five rooms,
swell furniture, Frigidaire, radio, everything.
"One day I was sick and come home in the afternoon.
The door didn't open. It was locked on the inside with the
chain. I called the landlord. I said: 'Break down that door/
and he done it.
"That fellow and another girl was drunk in bed. They
was as naked as young birds. They didn't have a feather
on. I satdown to the telephone, called up the station,
Then I packed my clothes and took the train
called a cab.
back home. He got a divorce. Cost him a hundred dollars.
Since then I'm cruel. I don't trust nobody."
The ambassador beckoned to the waiter and paid the
bill.

"O.K., Scheherazade," he said. "Tell me one thing. Do

you have any friends?"
"What do you mean, do I have any friends? I know mil-
lionaires in this town, know them personal. I don't let
them know I'm broke, I"
"Yes, I know. I mean friends who do know you're broke.
People you worked with. How long have you been out of
work?"
"Three months."
"Who's been paying the rent?"
Scheherazade inhaled deeply, extinguished her cigarette;
then, with the aid of her vanity case, made certain repairs
and revisions of her make-up.
n6 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
"Well, big boy, you give me three dollars when we first

setdown together."
The wall mirror of the booth gave back the reflection
of a posturing geisha; opposite her a dark young man who
bleakly regarded his own melancholy image.
"Why not?" said the ambassador. "The caliph gave me
fifty dollars for that yarn of yours, minus a few additions
and improvements. God, how many times have I gone

upstairs with the caliph. Don't .mind

. me,
. Schehera-
zade. I'm just a nut and I'm trying to think. Do you sup-

pose, Scheherazade, that there is any way we could manage

to be friends?"
The girl patted his hand. "Of course, honey. I'm a sport.
You been nice to me. You'll be surprised."
The ambassador took note of the thick arms; the skin
of the hands a little withered already she must have been
a laundry worker too at some time. At that moment, if
the ambassador had chanced to look at his reflection in the
mirror he would have seen an expression akin to hor-
ror. . Scheherazade was making preparations to leave.
. .

"Wait a moment, Scheherazade," he said desperately.

"Have another cigarette. Look, three dollars won't pay
the rent. Here's another couple of bucks. Sit still a mo-
ment. I want to think."
The girl tucked the bills in her stocking, lit her ciga-
rette,and regarded him curiously.
"Jeez, you're a funny guy. Here I'm all set to be nice
to you and you want to think. Nice, though. You
. . .

know, I've found it's sometimes the smartest guys that

talks the craziest. What's your line, big boy? I bet you
make plenty of dough."
 SCHEHERAZADE SWEENEY AND AMBASSADOR 117

But the ambassador was again lost in reverie. What had

the district organizer said? It was possible, though difficult,
to get them to fight the bosses; even the women. But it
was almost impossible to fight the movies, the radio, the
pulp magazines the caliph. That was why he was work-
ing so hard with the theater group, the school, the
Satur-

day night socials. But it was difficult to hold them. And it

would get worse, not better. What had Trotsky said in
pointing out the danger of delay and compromise
in
France: "With the further inevitable decay of capitalism,
the proletariat will not grow and reenforce itself, but
will decompose, constantly increasing the army of the un-
employed and slum-proletariat."
That was what was happening right here under his eyes.
It was happening in every city he had visited. It was like a

plague, starting in the slums and spreading outward.

Its

victims, most of them, did not even know the name of the
disease from which they were suffering; did not know its
causes, let alone its treatment and cure. The word "de-

spair" did not describe their condition. Despair implies

consciousness and they were too far gone for that. An

amorphous mass, existing only as a macabre burlesque of

the solemn pronouncements of liberal statesmen and re-
formers. What was Detroit? A permanent hysteria of mo-
tionan inhuman, mechanical bankruptcy, without any
human receivership in sight.
And what was he? A cleverer worm, saved from physical
suffering by a gift of agile parasitism, but afflicted with
the disease of consciousness; miserable now, because he
couldn't infect that gross, animal flesh opposite him with
the same disease, could not possibly convey to her his ver-
n8 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
sion of reality. But what if it had been possible? If she
could have known, if it were possible to make that be-
wildered creature understand, in what role could he pre-
sent himself he with his crocodile plea for "friendship"?
Had he not himself doped her, betrayed her ten times
more than she had been betrayed imaginatively by those
mythical story-book lovers she had bought at the news-
stand? Why had she embraced these myths? To dignify
her degradation; to compose, out of the trash of syndi-
cated day dreams, a histrionic personality with which to
confront, not unbravely, a reality too impossibly cruel to
admit to consciousness, let alone struggle with. As a part
of his service to the caliph he had betrayed her once.
Would he not be betraying her again worse than she had
ever been betrayed by the real lovers she had undoubtedly
had, under God knows what pitiable circumstances if he
insisted upon dragging her into the world of reality, the
world of strikes, of mass stultification and mass starvation,
of war, of revolution aching in the womb of history?
He had a sudden sadistic impulse. To hell with it. He
would sleep with this woman, beat her, torture her. Her
flesh at least was real, and he would make that flesh
suffer. . . .

The ambassador felt a hand on his brow. It was soft,

even humanly feminine and kind.
"You're tired, big boy," said the girl. "Hadn't I better

take you home?"

Under the street lamp at the corner the ambassador took

both of the girl's hands in his. They were warm, muscular.
The woman was all right. And the calluses were real.
 SCHEHERAZADE SWEENEY AND AMBASSADOR 119

"Good night, Scheherazade," said the ambassador. "Re-

member, you've got a date with me at the hall Saturday
night. Don't forget. You've got the address."
The hands pressed his, and stirred as if with an impulse
to embrace him.
"Then you're not coming home with me?"
"Not tonight."
The girl stared at him under the street light, her near-
sighted eyes straining painfully in simple animal curiosity.
"You certainly are a funny guy. What if I don't show
up?"
The ambassador shrugged.
"O.K., big boy. You're a nut all right. But I like you.
I'll be there."

For a moment the ambassador watched the handbag

swinging beside the heavy buttocks as the girl crossed the
square and disappeared down a side street.
It was four o'clock in the morning. The street cars had

stopped running, there were no taxicabs in sight, and any-

way, he reflected, he was short of money. In a half hour he
reached the ancient building that housed the Universal
Brotherhood of Relief; formerly a brothel, celebrated as
the "house of wonders," now housed a collection of
it

wobblies, labor organizers, and miscellaneous employed

and half-employed workers who had clubbed together to
reduce living expenses.
In the washroom he encountered the district organizer,
who had been up all night attending meetings and arrang-
ing strike plans.
"How's it going, Mike?" said the ambassador.
12O DETROIT AND CHICAGO
The *

yawned. 'Tough," he said. "And

district organizer

getting tougher. The boys are bound to be ready for some-

thing soon, though. The axle department at Mobillac hit
a new high yesterday 1,500 jobs as against Tuesday a
week ago. Is it a
speed-up! Maybe that'll teach those
damned hill-billies what they're up against. And I hear
something is likely to start again in Toledo. If Toledo
comes through we can bust it wide open here, and I don't
mean maybe."
The ambassador meditated. "Need any dough?"
The district organizer laughed hollowly. "Listen to the
guy. He asks me if I need any dough. Say, is this a
. . .

phony, or are you good for it?"

"McGladden's good for it," said the ambassador, as he

endorsed the check. "You can get somebody to cash it when
the bank opens. You don't mind spending McGladden's
dough, do you?"
"Hell, I'd spend Dillinger's dough if I could get my
hands on it. Say, you must be flush."
The ambassador shrugged.
"I'm pulling out this morning. The town's got my goat.
By the way, I picked up a tart in a cafe last evening. I'm
sending her around to the meeting Saturday night."
The district organizer looked blank.
"She said she used to work a punch press at Gurnstedt's."
"Oh, that's different. We've been trying to get into that
shop, especially that department."
"You don't mind if she's a tart?"
"Hell, no. What difference does it make? She's broke,
probably, and has to hustle a little. None of them like the
racket. If she's any good, we can use her maybe get her a
 SCHEHERAZADE SWEENEY AND AMBASSADOR 121

lousy job. . . . Well, good luck. And thanks. Come and

see us again. Good night. I'm dead for sleep."

intersection of the highway the ambassador paused

At an
to watch the rising sun insert its bland, incurious face
between the beautiful silvered smoke stacks of the River
Rouge plant. A car roared up and he thumbed it vainly.
Well, he reflected, there would be trucks soon he was
bound to catch something. Or a bus, perhaps. He counted
the change in his pocket. Less than three dollars. No, not

enough for bus fare. And no more checks. No longer, he

reflected, would he be able to make his living after the
fashion to which he had become accustomed. Curiously,
the reflection brought with it a sudden gust of elation. He
was broke; would probably continue to be broke. But he
was young. A young citizen of Mobilia, a civilization con-
ceived in motion, built on wheels, and dedicated to the
principle that everything and everybody must move faster
and faster. Well, a truck would come along soon.
. . .
 10
CHICAGO SKY RIDE

glimpse of that tremendous, fantastic cacoph-

MY
first

ony of steel and stone, of men and machines that

is called Chicago,, was when I drove into Gary from
the east and saw the tall smokestacks of the steel mills
pricking the evening sky with their ochre and orchid
flames. My last, just before I drove over the Wisconsin
line, was a backward look at the Temple of B'hai, its huge
yet delicate filagreed dome proclaiming a mystical gospel
of Love, which would yet, the B'haists assured me, unite

Gary, the Century of Progress, Sam Insull, Al Capone, and

the Chicago Tribune in a great international symphony
of beauty and peace.
Of what lies in between I have only a vague impression:
a smell of oil and a swirl of freight yards coming in; a
spurt of skyscrapers shooting up out of the tangle of the
Loop; art museums rivaling those of Rome and slums sur-
passing those of Naples; the ducal magnificence of the
Gold Coast barricaded on the Lake Shore Drive, with the
criminal leer of Little Sicily threatening to leak through
at any moment; the Standard-Oil-lubricated, neo-Gothic
monasticism of the University, fooling nobody, not even
itself; the whole bewildering congeries still held together,
more or less, by the tag-end of the pioneer, go-getting drive,
and a curious but genuine local patriotism; the Hog
122
 CHICAGO SKY RIDE 123

Butcher's appetite for pork still unsated; the Toolmaker

still creative and resourceful; the Freight Handler still

indomitably bent on keeping things moving. There was

an air of startled, bewildered, but still unsubdued youth
about the whole city; it seemed too old for the dum-dum
farce of Mayor Thompson and the gangsters, but still too

young and endure the purgations of tragedy.

to accept

Sandburg, alone, has made Chicago more articulate

than almost any other American city, but there have been

plenty of others: poets, novelists, sociologists, economists,

historians, aswarm of able newspaper people. I met some
of them, listened hard, and hereby tender my apologies
for learning as little as I did. The town was just too much
for me. Anyway, I became infatuated with the Century
of Progress they didn't properly appreciate it, I thought
and kept sneaking plunge myself in
off to its crowds and
gawk at its innumerable shows.
v

Gary Interlude

I saw both ends of Gary, the town being divided into

two parts: Main Street and the steel mills. The economic
pulse of steel is the pulse of Main Street: business is good
or bad, depending upon the size of the steel workers' pay

envelopes. You'd think, therefore, that the Main Street

merchants would be inclined to favor the first serious at-
tempt by the steel workers, since 1919, to bargain col-

lectively for bigger pay envelopes.

Well, they don't. When the steel strike threatened in
the spring of 1934, they got together and considered
whether or not they should refuse credit to strikers. This,
124 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
in spite of the fact that the Main Street landlords had
raised rents the moment the curve of steel production
went up. The merchants didn't strike against the land-
lords. They took it one of them took a 100 per cent in-
crease in the rent of one of his stores. But most of them
seemed to be in favor of the steel strikers' taking an aver-
age weekly income that keeps most of them at or below
the minimum subsistence level at which the Relief Ad-
ministration supports its clients. Markets? Pushed to the
wall, these small business men mutter irritably that they
can get along without markets. But the steel workers can't
live, let alone buy comforts on what they are getting? Let
them wait until business is better.
An Anglican priest told me that a while back he had
spoken at a Rotary luncheon in Gary, his subject being
the economic and social philosophy of Karl Marx. How
did the Rotarians like it, I asked? Not much, he replied.
This priest describes himself, not as a liberal, but as an
American, a Christian, and a family man. His congrega-
tion includes many of the "best people" of the community
steel mill bosses mostly as well as a percentage of steel

workers. It is he
feels, to present to his people
his duty,
the facts of the current social dilemma as he sees diem.
What future did he see for America, I asked. A type of
industrial feudalism, he thought, probably fascist; even
more probably, a war which would stimulate enormously
the activity of the Gary steel mills.
He said this at dinner preceding a meeting of the Weekly
Forum in the church adjoining. Across the table sat the
local rabbi, who had organized this Forum. The rabbi
was very enthusiastic about Lewis Corey's The Decline of
 CHICAGO SKY RIDE 125

American Capitalism. He had carried it all around town,

trying to get somebody to read it. Nobody had.
A few days before I had attended another meeting in
Gary, at the headquarters of the Amalgamated Association
of Iron, Steel,and Tin Workers. Newspaper reporters are
not very popular at that end of Main Street. The first thing
the district organizer did was to tell the meeting there was
a reporter in the house, and that he was requested to come

up front so that everybody could have a look at him and

watch him take notes. I acceded to the request with utter
promptness. The second thing the organizer did was to
place a chair beside mine and demand that the company
stool pigeon come down front and occupy it. The infer-
ence was clear. Fortunately for my sensibilities, the stool
pigeon, if present, did not reveal himself.
The meeting was called chiefly to hear the reports of
the officers and members who had testified at the hearings
of the National Steel Labor Board in Chicago the day

preceding, at which the Amalgamated had petitioned for

a supervised election in the plant of the Gary Screw and
Bolt Company. Similar petitions had been filed during
the week affecting other steel plants in the vicinity of Gary.
The 'hearings affected more or less crucially the lives of
hundreds of thousands of workers in the Chicago-Gary
steel district. But the Chicago papers carried no more than
scattered paragraphs concerning them. Under pressure
from the Gary locals of the Amalgamated, the Gary Post-
Tribune devoted a page to the hearing in the Gary Screw
and Bolt Company case.
As in the hearings I had witnessed in Pittsburgh, coun-
sel for the Company denied the jurisdiction of the Board,
126 DETROIT AND CHICAGO

pending court test. The testimony of the Amalgamated

witnesses was similar to that given by the workers in the

Duquesne plant of the Carnegie Steel Corporation, with

some interesting differences. It appeared that some honest,
ifnaive steel workers had joined the company union and
attempted to secure a restoration of a cut. When turned
down by management, two of the three company union
the

representatives had resigned and joined the Amalgamated.

further appeared that W. R. Irwin, general manager
It

of the Gary Screw and Bolt Company, was serving on the

local Compliance Board, although his own company was
not operating under the code and denied the jurisdiction
of the NRA
Labor Board. But the high point of the hear-
ing came when white-haired Admiral Wiley turned on
Ernest S. Ballard, counsel for the Corporation, and de-
clared heatedly:
"Mr. Ballard, the whole steel industry is taking a dif-

ferent position than you do. ... First, you challenged

the Board's authority. You'll find that out soon and
thoroughly. You'll find you stand alone. There are a great
many developments in this matter that put a new com-
plexion on the whole thing."
Which left the Amalgamated organizers wondering
whether the Admiral was bluffing, or really did have some
cards up his sleeve. (Later. He was bluffing, and the NRA
died.)

In the year of the depression, Chicago's Main

fifth

Street, which is somewhere in the vicinity of Michigan

Boulevard and the Loop, still had a ten-o'clock-in-the-
morning air of hustling conquest. It is a man's town; the
 CHICAGO SKY RIDE 127

steers are slaughtered, the pork packed, and the steel

hammered right in the center of the city. It is men who
do these things. Men sit in the skyscraper offices and weave
the tangled threads of Chicago's financial, industrial and
civic destiny. Smartly dressed men, with hard blue eyes
and pocket handkerchiefs matching their eyes and their
ties,prowl up and down the canyons of the Loop; on
business, I suppose, although God knows what business.
Also heavy-shouldered harvest hands and lumberjacks drift
in and out of the saloons of the shabbier side streets. A
man's town; the women are handsomer than those on
Fifth Avenue, but less chic and they don't rule the roost.
Business, politics, the extra-legal departments of govern-
ment operated by the gangsters all men's games. Chicago
be incorrigibly and abjectly funny. I
politics continues to
was there during the election and was told that the Kelly-
Nash machine was bitter at heart, but realistic. "Honest"
Harold Ickes the appellation carries indignant overtones
when uttered by local politicians had so restricted the
PWA money spent in Chicago that the boys just couldn't
get their fingers on it. The situation was painful and al-
most without precedent; it was aggravated by the timeli-
ness of the government's prosecution of Samuel W. Insull,
with its staggering revelations of financial and
political
"wizardry."
Under the circumstances, the Chicago bosses considered
a modicum of respectability to be
politically expedient.
Hence the frenzied intensity with which the Kelly-Nash
cohorts embraced the New Deal. What with the
daily shel-
lacking they were taking from the Tribune and the News,
they had no recourse but to get the New Deal religion and
128 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
get hard, with the expectation that afterward they would
it

get their reward in the form of the usual secular arrange-

ments.
A well-known educator whom I interviewed explained
in sociological terms the furious opposition to the New
Deal led by the Chicago Tribune. Chicago, he pointed
out, is still rugged individuals on the make. They
full of
are both more ambitious and
less secure than the corre-

sponding business leaders in Boston and Philadelphia.

Hence their loud outcries of "Hands off Business," their
objection to the alphabetical government controls, their
demands for a balanced budget, etc.
Chicago had about 280,000 families on relief when I
was there and was spending about $10,000,000 a month,
of which the FERA contributed 75 per cent. The average

monthly budget was around $28.00. But these statistics

give no picture of what was happening in the slum dis-
tricts and doubtless still is. A sociologist told me that a
recent survey of one of these districts had shown that prac-
tically every individual men, women, and children was
engaged in some form of criminal activity. It even ap-
peared that this form of self-help was preferred to the
conventional forms of relief.
The sociologist who contributed this tid-bit was more
or less typical in his personal attitudes of the academic
social scientists I encountered both in Chicago and else-
where. They have accumulated vast quantities of valuable
descriptive material Chicago, in particular, under the
leadership of Professor Robert Park, has made an ex-
traordinarily rich contribution. But they adhere to Veb-
len's earlier attitude: they are more interested in what is
 CHICAGO SKY RIDE 129

happening and in what is likely to happen than in making

things happen that they leave to the politicians. It does
no good to point out that no science and no art begins and
ends with fact-finding; that some sort of social philosophy
must guide the collection of facts and control their inter-
pretation and use. Nor was I able to impress anybody with
my mild observation that these sociologists were them-
selves a part of the subject matter of their analyses; that

they were citizens as well as sociologists; that if they let

the facts stew long enough, some sort of fermented action
would ensue action in which they would have to partici-
pate willy-nilly on one side or the other.
I met some distinguished exceptions, but on the whole
I concluded that the red-hunters are wasting their time at
the University of Chicago. I realize that my testimony is
suspect, but I beg to assure Mr. Walgreen, Mr. Hamilton
Fish, and others, that these professors are class-conscious
in the "right" way their class being the professional mid-
dle class, tied to the academic machinery, which is in
turn dominated by conservative government or conserva-
tive business. They have excellent minds in certain minor
and inconclusive respects it seemed to me that they had
outgrown the radicals intellectually. But the radicals have
outgrown them emotionally, which means that the pro-
fessors will be followers, not leaders, and whites more
probably than reds. They are economically comfortable
and love their specialized, "objective" and more or less
obsolete scholarship. They will move with the process as
long as it can make a place for them, keeping their rela-
tive positions in the social order of our declining capital-
ism. The process will do increasing violence to their con-
130 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
victions and force them and higher strato-
into higher

spheres of Olympian But they are gentle

rationalization.

people, pacifists in the larger sense, and they will die

rather than act. It is too bad for the radical movement,
which will be quite genuinely handicapped if it has to
get along without them. It will be too bad for them if they
have to die anyway "objectively/* and without acting.

The Exposition

I attended the Century of Progress during its conclud-

ing two weeks, so that Mr. Rufus C. Dawes, whom I inter-

viewed, was then in a position to give me, with approxi-
mate accuracy, the financial balance sheet of that amazing
enterprise. The more I studied those figures, the more I

was obliged to conclude that showmanship still

pays in
America.
Thirty-seven million paid admissions had passed
through the gates of the Biggest Show Ever. Eighty per
cent of the $10,000,000 Century of Progress bond issue had
been or would be paid off perhaps more; the financial
backers of the exposition might possibly break even, which
would be an all-time world record. In addition, as Mr.
Dawes pointed out, much weight must be given to the
indirect benefits to Chicago merchants and landlords; to
the gasoline filling stations along the highways leading to
Chicago; to a general release of spending stimulated by
the exposition.
So much for the financial balance sheet. But the moral
benefits, Mr. Dawes insisted, were also important. Mr.
Dawes is and likable business man, so
a genial I ventured
 CHICAGO SKY RIDE 131

to jest with him. Was he referring to Sally Rand and the

Streets of Paris, I asked? Mr. Dawes had heard that one
before and had his answer ready. The Midway, he sug-
gested, bore the same relation to the net purpose and sig-
nificance of the exposition as football bears to the purpose
and significance of our great universities. He was referring
to other moral benefits: our morale was very low, and the
successful putting over of the exposition under unprece-
dented difficulties was in itself an act of courage from
which both Chicago and the country at large may well
have derived moral stimulus and inspiration.
I was obliged to concede some validity to his
point. As
a job of technical planning and administration the exposi-
tion, from beginning to end, was impressive, not to say

magnificent. These Chicago business leaders, I reflected,

are capable of astonishing tours de force. True, it is pos-
sible to contend that the whole idea of the exposition was
an evasion of the and economic dilemma with which
social

Chicago and the country was and is faced. Chicago, as

Margaret Ayer Barnes wrote in the Survey Graphic, is "a
child that would rather give a party like the Century of

Progress than wash its own hands and brush its own teeth."
But it was a swell party, beautifully organized and effi-
ciently conducted. And it had its genuine values, as I dis-
covered when I went out looking for those moral benefits
Mr. Dawes was so eloquent about.
The Hall of Science was, of course, the piece de resist-
ance of the show. It was big magic, utterly respectable,
and completely sanctioned by the mores of all classes and
all communions. But the older magic of the church was
also represented. "Righteousness Exalteth a Nation," read
132 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
the inscription over the Hall of Religion, much smaller,
but still impressive, which adjoined the Hall of Science.
If the planners of the exposition had been puritanical, or
it would have ended there.
unrealistic, or un-sociological,
But they were none of these things. A few blocks away
from the Halls of Science and Religion there began the
Midway, which provided in generous measure the oldest
magic of all the magic of sex.
I entered reverently into all three temples and did my
best to observe the attitudes of my fellow-worshipers. The
science was real, especially the basic science exhibits pre-

pared by the universities and scientific societies. Middle-

western farmers paused, studied, and made was
notes. It
their science, their cultural heritage, and it was undoubt-

edly very great. Moreover, they and their lives were inex-
tricably caught up in the applications of this science. Yet
something was wrong and one saw that they felt it. It was
their science, they were a part of it, yet somehow it was

being misused and disused. The golden cord of this magic

was broken; the pitcher was broken at the fountain. Re-
membering the^ twelve million unemployed, the twenty
million on relief, the languishing mines and mills I had
seen, it seemed to me that this science was like the inert

deposit of a glacial drift, dumped on the southern shore

of Lake Michigan for crowds of modern savages to marvel
over.
In the Hall of Religion I saw the Great Chalice of Anti-
och is it the original Holy Grail? and heard a devout
but uninspiring home girl explain its beauties to a thin
group of middle-western church women. It and the other
treasures of religious art which constituted the exhibit
 CHICAGO SKY RIDE 133

were both beautiful and fascinating. But the crowds had

gone elsewhere. The owner of the exhibit was reported
to be disappointed and a little shocked.
There was also, perhaps, something shocking about the
fact that the Streets of Paris was relatively successful it
took in a million and a half dollars the first year. I visited
this den of iniquity and asked the gate attendant: "Is this
just standard carnival stuff?" "Yeah," he replied. "It's a
lot of tripe."
This judgment was accurate in a general way. There
were, however, some new wrinkles. I found the girl bark-
ers particularly interesting. They were young, not hard-

boiled, and their line went something like this:

"Friends, you may be surprised when I tell you that we
have had thousands of women in our audiences, and why
not? This is a very beautiful dance. It is daring; it is very
daring. But you may be assured that no woman or girl
who goes into this show will be insulted."
While I debated whether or not this would be worth a
dime, I was brushed aside by a middle-aged, two-hundred-
pound woman who, judging from her appearance, might
well have been the famous Old Lady from Dubuque. She
sat grimly through a four minute, very mediocre stomach
dance.And when she came out, believe it or not, she sat
down and had her photograph taken in the middle of the
Streets of Paris.

Beating a hasty retreat from this disconcerting phe-

nomenon, I took refuge in the Hall of Social Sciences.
Under the direction of Professor E. A. Hooton of Harvard,
a small of anthropologists were taking anthropometric
staff

measures of visitors to the exposition. The customers

134 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
thought was a kind of free phrenology, and the anthro-
it

pologists their hands in glee. When I was there

rubbed
they had obtained 6,000 measurements, the biggest series
on record. But what I wanted to know was what went on
inside that old lady's head that head and all the other
6,000 or 37,000,000 heads. I don't know; nor do the soci-
ologists.
What the sociologists did do was to try to put something
into those heads. In one of their exhibits, prepared under
the direction of Donald Slesinger of the University of

Chicago, they actually went so far as to inform the visitors

that there was a depression, although elsewhere the Cen-

tury of Progress vigorously ignored this fact. In this socio-

logical exhibit a series of well-conceived diorama set forth
graphically the sequence of events since 1929. They showed
what happened, but not how, or why. If the sociologists
understood these latter points, which may be doubted,
they were not permitted to tell.
saved the Sky Ride for the last, which was fortunate,
I

becauseit gave me a bad time. I was

suspicious of the thing
from the beginning. I was taken up to the top of the
tower in an elevator, had a look at the gondola that was
to take me across the lagoon, and was willing to call it

enough right there. But the crowd pushed from behind,

so I got in, and the thing started.
It was a malicious-looking contraption made of steel
plates, with two decks and a dishonest reptilian nose. It
creaked and groaned, and every time it passed one of the
cable supports it vented an obscene mechanical impreca-
tion that froze my blood. Seldom have I been so terrified.
I looked for reassurance in the faces of my fellow pas-
 CHICAGO SKY RIDE 135

sengers, but they were as solemn as idols. Maybe, I re-

flected, they were having stomach pangs, too. I tried look-
ing at the lighted panorama of the Century of Progress
below me; tried telling myself that it was splendidly, bar-
barically beautiful, which it was. But the blue, green, and
yellow lights made me giddy. I bent my head and closed
my eyes. That was worse, because I could not control my
thoughts. Anything as fantastically silly as that Sky Ride, I

reflected, must logically embody defects of design and

workmanship. How have felt, what would I have
would I

done, I asked myself, if I had been an engineer and had

been asked to design, not a useful bridge or turbine, but a
Sky Ride?
I had a sudden vision of a demoniac engineer, rubbing

his hands and reading with macabre glee a newspaper

account of how
that gondola had dropped to the bottom of
the lagoon with me in it. wife would read that account
My
too, I reflected, and she would be ashamed. "Progress, in-
deed!" she would sniff. "Served him right." It would be
very much as if I had been found knifed to death in a
brothel.

By the time we reached the other side of the lagoon I

was bathed in perspiration. The thing stopped and I tried
weakly to get out. But no. The door remained closed. I
must go all the way back again ... I collapsed in a 1

corner of the car and gave myself up for lost.

I assure my readers that this account of my adventure

is
only slightly exaggerated. As it
happened, of course, I

had permitted my imagination to malign the sobriety, the

integrity, the responsibility of the engineering profession.
The gondola got back all right, I crept out, stiffened my-
136 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
self with the nearest available stimulant, and returned to
my lodgings. There rapidly made notes for a poem I
I

would have my revenge in verse! The poem, or the exer-

cise incadenced prose, whatever it may be called, appears
as the next chapter. When it was done I sent a copy to
Mr. Rufus C. Dawes, to whom, as you will note, the work
was addressed. I received a courteous but non-committal
acknowledgment from his secretary.
 11

CENTURY OF PROGRESS

The Bard Speaks

Muses, and O, Mr. Rufus C. Dawes,

1 was there, it was wonderful, the ache of that wonder is

still in my bones.
Tell me, O Muses, and you, O ruler of the feast, Great
Khan, and you, Chicago,
What century is this, what capon's treble crow, what
snatched shriek of kidnaped souls
Cries "Progressl" the Word made steel?

I was there, I saw Arcturus blink, and the lights went on,
and it was beautiful.
I saw the mechanical man, the robot, the Perfect
Knight-
Tell me, O Muses, and you, Great Khan, what frightened
hands have throned
This chromium boogie-man to scare the crows of destiny?

I was there, O ruler of the feast, Great Khan, the freedom

of the press protected me; I heard
The grave voice of the lecturer introducing the Atom in
Person, which then uttered
Itscustomary cosmic nonsense, by which I was not amused,
remarking only, "By what right
These merchant-mummers ask the sufferance of the bard?"
137
138 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
This, too, I heard, O Muses, a small voice wailing, ancient
and lonely:
They broke me on a Ferris wheel, O God, they wildered
me with fans;
The drum thumped, the stomach dancer jerked, they took
me for a Sky Ride and I never came back.

I was there, humbly among the last; I heard that voice, I

tell I'll tell it

you truthfully,
Even to Arcturus, this was what I heard; incapable of
perfectness, ungrateful humanity's
The sty in the photo-electric eye, the static curse; I heard:
/ was a man, but they broke me on a Ferris wheel, they
wildered me with fans;
They stuffed me into a Simmons bed, sleep, my love, and
peace attend thee;
They made me into an automobile tire and I rolled away,
Rolled away, rolled away, merrily we roll away. . . .

Muses, and O, Mr. Rufus C. Dawes,

Forgive the cracked voice of the bard, the soiled hands
clutching the departing coat-tails of the Century's most
successful impresario, forgive
The blunt fingers plucking strings untuned, the crushed
masque of Thalia uttering Melpomene's voice, the comic
tears, the bruised laughter.
1was there, humbly among the last; I sat in a corner gnaw-
ing the tossed bone of the bard's portion and the electric
taste was bitter in my teeth.
Thank you, Mr. Dawes, the free pass was very generous of
you, thank you, Mr. Dawes, but? O, anything, Mr.
 CENTURY OF PROGRESS 139

Dawes, what you think it's worth. A Century of Progress

can afford these archaic human grace notes, like the
hog-caller, the hillbilly fiddler, so obviously inferior to
the Theremin, and now the poet. What you like, Mr.
Dawes, any little thing left over, a burned-out radio
tube, or, say, a used star.

Jean Baptiste Point DeSaible

(One of the exhibits at the Century of Progress was a re-

production of the cabin which DeSaible, a Santo Do-
mingo Negro, built in 1789 on the present site of the
city of Chicago.)

Muskrats in the bayous, and mink, and otter, and beaver,

Water-fowl thick in the reeds by the lake, the fat grouse
zooming out of the dune thickets;
Black man, Chicago remembers you, the table is set for
you, say:
"Yassah, thank you, sah. Sho' is wonderful" no, he spoke
French.

Wonderful, Jean Baptiste, the tall towers rising like reeds

by the bayous, the fleet motors
Scudding like deer along the lake front, the seaplanes
zooming
Up from the blue lagoon, and thousands of bathers splash-
ing, calling-
Careful, Jean Baptiste, this is white man's water, the stones
fly, the black swimmer sinks, now shots
140 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
Ring out, the tribes are swarming, the white, the black
ho, chiefs, beat the drums!
Illini,Chechaqua, Potawatomi, come, the hunt is on,
there are scalps to be taken!

Chicago remembers you, Jean Baptiste, your cabin is here,

the latch string is out; eat now, O lean
Black ghost, the iron rations of this dream!
Take what is left, black man, the deer are gone, and the
beaver; the geese
Honk lonely and high, the bison, the maned herds gone,
Gone from the fenced prairie, the trapper is trapped, the
black man
Trapped in his hut, the great khan in his tower, the squaw
Gone from the tepee; the pale bucks seek her where the
prurient lights
Mock and reveal, reveal and mock she wilders them with
fans!

Eat dreams, black man, they are dream-eaters here; the

pounding presses eat
breathe fire, but men
Steel, the furnaces eat coal,
Eat dreams; the bitter juice of power
Burns through the night O black man, the unknowing
stars, will no cry reach?
Be warned, Arcturus! See, in forty years
They pale and scatter, they have trapped
Arcturus in the sky!

Dream-eaters, black man, see, they come,

Millions of dream-eaters, white and black and brown and
yellow,
 CENTURY OF PROGRESS 141

Murmuring, docile, ox-eyed and wondering; the maned

herds
Are gone, Jean Baptiste, the dream-eaters slew them, and
now
Be quiet, black man, let them munch
The iron rations of their dream.

Mrs. Wilbur C. Lott

"Migawd, Peg, do you see that old gal?"

Oh, the things you see
In the streets of gay Paree
"You mean the old freighter moving into*'
'Tor crying out loud, she's going into Dot's booth! Do I

know her? Does Dot know herl"

Oh, such a funny feeling
Goes way up to the ceiling
"No use, I gotta do my act: Friends, you may be surprised
when I tell you that we have thousands of women in
our audiences. This is a very beautiful dance. It is dar-
ing it is very daring but you may be assured no woman or girl
whogoesintothisshowwillbeinsulted IgottabeatitPegtake
theticketswillya."
You are just in time
And it
only costs a dime
The wages of sin, Mrs. Lott: eight dimes and sixteen eyes,
all somewhat inflated; the sin,
The dimes, the eyes. Trapped, Mrs. Lott, yes, sin
Is
trapped, made pure, sin too; how virginal
142 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
That navel, Dorothy's a good girl, tell it in Gath, tell it in
Wurtsboro, Nebraska, Dorothy's
A good home girl, dance, Dorothy, twirl the beads of the
breasts, Dorothy's
A good girl, eight dimes, three minutes, out this way, you
are
Just in time
And it
only costs a dime
Look back, Mrs. Lott, you will not
Be turned to salt; the salt, Mrs. Lott tell it in Gath, tell
it in Wurtsboro, has lost
Its savor, the bottom's dropped out of the hell business,
Lucifer
(What's the use of writing it, no publisher would print
what they did to Lucifer.)
"Have your photograph moment,
taken, Lady? . . .
Just a
I'll down, Mrs.
write it

Wilbur C. Lott, Wurtsboro, Nebraska. Thanks, Mrs. Lott,

how's things
Out your way? Yes, it's a good show, gives a lot of girls
A chance to make some dough. Come back soon, tell your
friends comeupnseeussumtime."
You are just in time
And it
only costs a dime.

Wilbur C. Lott

Mr. Wilbur C. Lott, address Wurtsboro, Nebraska, R.F.D.

3, having made
 CENTURY OF PROGRESS 143

Five hundred dollars in the not-growing wheat business,

has paid the interest on the mortgage and brought
Two brown hands, minus one finger caught in the binder
in 1920, a sixty-year-old back, a little rheumatic now,
and
Mary, aged ten, Elizabeth, aged eight, Wilbur, Jr., aged
six and
"Be quiet, Junior, your ma said she'd meet us in the Hall
of Religion; listen, that's
The voice of the atom, talking to us: 'Wawk, wawk, blat-
"
ter, blatter.'

The voice of the atom, succinct, unintelligibly precise and

scrupulously
Irresponsible, the dance of electrons wildly weaving meas-
ureless measures before no throne:

Chastely, obscenely, these adjectives being themselves

merely fortuitous
Eddies of atoms in the blood; did the astronomers really
see
Arcturus, or was it a clot in blood-shot eyes? But no, the
lights went on, the photo-electric cell
Can't lie; come back, Mrs. Lott, repent, abjure
The weaving hips, the orgiastic quest, the photo-electric
cell
Can't lie, Arcturus is real, and God . . .

God, Mrs. Lott, Mr. Lott, and all the little Lotts
(I have it on the highest authority; the mathematicians
tried to fit the cube root of Pi square X
into Planck's

quantum, and it didn't splice; the chemists, the physi-

144 DETROIT AND CHICAGO
cists, the astronomers, all banged their heads together

somewhere south of Halley's comet; they all came home

trailing ecclesiastical vestments, and God)
I have it on the highest authority, Mr. Lott, believe me,
God
Is a Christian Scientist, so the apparent absence of that
tenth fingeris sheer illusion, to be
precise, a mortal
error,
And that north quarter will be green with wheat when

you get home even though, being a law-abiding citizen

and a believer in Progress under the New Deal, you
didn't plant it, isn't science wonderful? . . .

"Come, Mary, come, Junior, it's time to meet your ma."

The Holy Grail

(The great Chalice of Antioch, possibly the original of the

Holy Grail legend, was exhibited, along with the Cathe-
dral silver treasure found with the Chalice and other
treasures of ancient religious art, in the Hall of Religion
at the Century of Progress.)

"Righteousness exalteth a nation," and power

Craves sanctions beyond itself. Is it true the mechanical
man, the robot, the Perfect Knight
Bowed here, braying his electronic "mea culpa, mea
culpa"? The foxes
Have their holes, and the Great Chalice of Antioch
Has a room to itself with special admission, ten cents, and
 CENTURY OF PROGRESS 145

a thin-voiced spinster snatched from a Kansas choir-

loft:"The sacred cup
Enshrined by the Chalice will be the chief interest of"
Mrs. Lott, hot with hurry, heavy with sin unsinned (Dor-
othy won't tell, Mrs. Lott, and anyway
Was it not Magdalen who drove the leopards in the "King
of Kings"?) Be quiet, Junior "the scroll
Of the law ... in the corresponding position we be-
hold ... in Glory, clad in the imperial robe ... an
Emperor."

Power, Mrs. Lott, craves sanctions beyond itself; the me-

chanical man will yet
Make terms with the Galilean; wanting miracles, how
Shall the cup be filled? "All thanks
To Thee, Great Stalin"; a century, two centuries, will not
the Georgian bank-robber join
Hathor, and Baal, the Man of Sorrows, that Knavish
Thunderer, Yahweh? (The voice of the atom, the elec-
trons weaving measureless measures before no throne;
"canst thou bind
The cluster of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?")
But the Parthenon, the well-loved marble still
Stands, and the mummied Lenin is peer of Amenhotep,
and you'll find, Mrs. Lott,
A Gideon Bible by your bedside in the tourist home.
146 DETROIT AND CHICAGO

Savant

Objectively, professor,
The spectacle has merit: the lights, the color, the savage
Music, the changeless multitude changing their bread for
the new wine of old magic, the greatness
Indubitable, the brazen century gathering the god-quest of
all history into one hoarse-frantic death-cry, "Progress!"

No tribal episode this, professor, no desert Calvary; the

electronic cock

Flaps searchlight wings over the night of the inland sea,

crows thrice, and the Son of Man
Bleeds on a million crosses. . . .

Parse this, old man

In what language? Measure it with what calipers? Judge
it by what law? Stew it in what
brain-pan?

Objectively, professor,
You have hives, the cause being the friction of the peda-

gogical imperative upon the physical rear of the incor-

rigible ape. When thought
Grows you can do anything with it ex-
spears, professor,
cept sit onhave a
it; drink,
Professor, you have traveled far
From the cornfields of Kansas that bred you, faithful and
kind; you have served
Truth honestly, as you served your cows (Hathor will
reward you); have puffed
 CENTURY OF PROGRESS 147

Yeast in the dough of young minds, have earned

Fame, respect, a free pass to the Century of Progress, in-
cluding even
The Sky Ride; have a drink, professor, and as for the hives
No caustic will burn them, yours or mine, no syllogism
soothe; we are
Half-breeds, professor, our mothers loved
Not wisely but too well; the ghostly betrayer
Strives in our blood, but we are not gods, so drink,
Professor, and not to wisdom; the wise dead
Know all, forgive all, but we are
Not dead, the clock still ticks, we are men, so drink
A toast to battle, that being our portion; not wisdom, not
peace; did the ax that hewed
The wilderness, the plow that raped the buffalo sod, did

they bring
Peace, the catalytic precipitant, the solving formula? No,
they brought the infinite
Sum of all multiplication, the ineluctable quotient of all
division; they brought
The sailor home from the sea, the hunter home from the
hill, the hawk-minds back
From the farthest perches of thought. . . .

Back, professor, to this narrow house of mirrors where the

blind, wanting sight, are saved from seeing
The man facing man, the antagonist
terror in blind eyes,
unseen, the weapons infinite, the conflict unending, the
issue
Never to be known, the victory
Earth-bitter, earth-parturient. . . .
148 DETROIT AND CHICAGO

Objectively, professor,
Heads will fall, the great khan's certainly, Mr. Lott and
Mrs. Lott in innocent parenthesis, also
Yours, professor, and mine, the beautiful battle being no
Respecter of persons, and the god-strain being
Recessive though permanent. . . .

Objectively, professor,
Have a drink, the night pales, the morning shows
Spots on the sun, a haze of battle in the east, and mourn-
fully, beautifully, the sound
Of trumpets. . . .
WHAT TIME IS IT IN THE NORTH
CENTRAL FARM-BELT?
 WISCONSIN: A PROBLEM COUNTY

you start from the capitol at Madison, point your car

IFapproximately northwest, and drive about a hundred
miles, you run right into the middle of the problem which
President Roosevelt stated succinctly, if
incompletely, in
his book, Looking Forward:
"Land utilization involves more than a mere determin-
ing of what each and every acre of land can be used for,
or what crops it can best grow. This is the first step; but
having made that determination, we arrive at once at the
larger problem of getting men, women, and children
in
other words, population to go along with a program and
carry it out."
Quite innocently, and apparently without any pres-
cience of the current New Deal dilemma, nature laid
down the physiographic determinants of the problem some
fifty or a hundred thousand years ago, when the glacier
melted and retreated, leaving a great lake, out of which
protruded the sandstone buttes of an earlier geologic
epoch. Then the lake, which must have been 250 feet
deep in places, broke through its land barriers and flowed
out through the Mississippi, leaving what is now known
as thesand plain area of central Wisconsin. Much of it is
comprised within Juneau County, and Juneau is one of
151
152 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
Wisconsin's "problem counties." It is partly nature's fault,

but by no means wholly.

Less than a hundred years ago the northern half of
Juneau County must have been a quite lovely expanse of
open marshland, alternating with virgin stands of pine
more or less amicably divided between the
timber. It was
Menominee and Winnebago tribes of Indians. They
hunted and fished and the Winnebagos,
especially, picked
cranberries. The marshes weregreen with the sphagnum
moss, in which incredible numbers of wild ducks built
their nests. There is comparatively little sphagnum moss
now, which is too bad, because the sphagnum is a valuable
litter for scientifically managed hen houses; also the ob-
stinate instinct of certain ducks insists on sphagnum moss
nests. Less sphagnum, less ducks. Also, less cranberries.
The management of the cranberry bog farmers-
scientific
Wisconsin is third on the
of the cranberry states to-
list

day produces only about a fifth of the quantity of cran-

berries that grew wild fifty years ago. So say, at least, the
oldest inhabitants, including Hank Thunder, the ancient
Winnebago I met on the road fixing a tire of his delapi-
dated Ford.
Less water, less sphagnum, less cranberries, less ducks
ultimately, of course, less people. Juneau County, before
they cut the timber and before they built the 250 miles
of drainage ditches that theoretically were to transform

sandy marshland into an agricultural paradise,

this barren,
was a pretty good physiographic base for the wandering
tribes of hunting, fishing, berry-picking Indians. Today it

is a desert, with the water flowing off through those ex-

cellently engineered ditches that so effectively lowered
 WISCONSIN: A PROBLEM COUNTY 153

the water table; with the white sand showing through the
shallow layer of deceptively black peat whenever it is
stirred by the plow; with the peat itself burned by the
fires consume the struggling second growth of aspen,
that
scrub oak and jack pine with monotonous regularity; with
whole villages abandoned and the window panes out of
every second house you pass; with here and there a white
squatter and his family peering out of a tar-paper shack no
bigger than a large outhouse; with the Indians them-
selvesyes, the ancient Winnebagos, coming back to pick
for miserable wages what cranberries can still be grown
with the water that is now being painfully nursed back
into their ravished domain.
It started with the timber barons in 1848 or thereabout.

Even before the government negotiated a treaty with the

two tribes, the lumbermen were camped on the bank of
the Yellow River with twenty teams of young oxen ready
to go. By 1890 they had pretty well cleaned up; there are
still a few
paper mills in a near-by county, but they get
most of their pulp wood from northern Minnesota and
Canada, paying as much as $5.00 a cord for freight. The
Land Development Division of the state agricultural de-
partment urges them to grow their timber in their own
back yards and they'd like to if. But there are so many
"ifs" in this complex but far from unique
physiographic,
economic and sociological problem that the rough solution
proposed by the Federal government seems, on the whole,
the best way out. It is to turn most of this area into a
and game sanctuary; that means using the labor
bird, fish,

provided by the transient and CCC camps to dam those

foolish ditches, get the water level back, restore the sphag-
154 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
num and the complex plant and animal life that feeds the
fish and the game birds, bring water to the commercial
cranberry bogs, cut fire trails so that fires can be stopped
before they burn what is left of the second growth and
the peat, and finally, reshuffle the population into some
reasonable conformity with the new physiographic base.
I saw some of these things already being done. The Fed-
eral government is developing a program and the FERA,
the Forestry and Fisheries Departments, the Indian Bu-
reau, also various state departments and the Agricultural
Experiment Station they are all in on it. Between them,
by an enormous expenditure of labor and much jarring
of official jealousies, they may be able to unscramble the
idiocies of four generations of grabbers, speculators and

destroyers.
In the process they will expose and conflict with the
fiscalbankruptcies and legal impossibilities of town,
county, and state government. What, for example, will
the business men of the little trading center of Necedah
do if the government' moves their tributary population
elsewhere. raised the question. The
Necedah has already
cranberry growers, having vested interests in certain ripa-
rian rights, have raised other questions. Finally, if the
ditches are dammed, the water level raised, the complex
natural and human ecology restored if then five times as
many cranberries are grown in Juneau County as at pres-
ent, what will happen to the Massachusetts and New
Jersey growers? market were flooded, might it not
If the

then be necessary to unplug the ditches, and by returning

the land to desert, peg the market for cranberries? In other
words, is it possible to plan and order the physiography
 WISCONSIN: A PROBLEM COUNTY 155

and the economy of any part of economy without a func-

tional coordination of the whole?
Without trying to answer this question, but still sticking
to my theme of idiocies and impossibilities, let me say a
word about those ditches. They were dug about 1900,
when agriculture was expanding and the tide of immigra-
tion was at its The owners of the land including
height.
some of the lumber barons who had ravished it from the
Indians and mined the timber issued $783,000 worth of
Drainage Bonds and the banks bought them. With
District
this money, most of which was never repaid, they dug the
ditches which were to make fertile farms out of this sandy
marsh. Because of the black peat surface the land looked
good and hundreds of farmers including some dry farm-
ers returning disappointed from the Dakotas and Montana
it.
bought
Even then some of the state agricultural Experts knew
better. They shouted in vain that this was sand, and that

only impossibly heavy expenditures of potash would make

it possible to grow anything on it.
They pointed out what
any layman can see now, simply by driving into and out
of the bed of that glacial lake, that there were huge acre-
ages of better land elsewhere in Wisconsin and that the
immigrants should be settled on this relatively better land
if
anywhere.
But the ditches were dug; the land was drained and
sold atpeak prices. Then the water level fell; the farmers
turned the shallow peat sod, found the sand underneath,
gave up trying to grow profitable crops and departed. The
county carried more and more tax-delinquent land; its
fiscal base contracted
although it was obliged to maintain
156 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
roads and schools for the residual scattered population of
submarginal farmers. It got much worse after the War
when the bottom fell out of the agricultural market. It

got unspeakably worse with the depression and the

drought, and now the New Deal faces the task of re-plan-
ning and re-ordering the whole business.
I asked Hank Thunder, the Winnebago, who had come
back from Nebraska to pick cranberries where his tribe
had formerly picked them, what he thought about Had
it.

the white men scrambled things impossibly? Would the

Winnebagos, some day, have their turn again?
Hank, I was told, understands English and can answer
questions if he chooses. He did not choose.
 13
A CENTURY OF EVASION

HAVE the huge interest

testified, in all sincerity, to

I and value of the Century of Progress show as a source

of data, even a source of inspiration for the student. But
it must also be said, in plain prose, that the Biggest Show

Ever was not, in any true sense, an exposition, and that

its title was a misnomer.

From a civilized point of view, our history, for much

more than a century, has been a history of flight from
reality, of evasion. The achieved result of this evasion
has been to deposit upon the doorsteps of this generation
a heart-breaking accumulation of crimes against nature
and crimes against man; of false philosophies and shoddy,
adolescent dreams which have been elaborately institu-
tionalized, even architectured in stone and steel: in short,
an accumulation of childish economic and political
social,

bankruptcies. That these bankruptcies seem childish,

viewed in the chastened perspective with which the de-
pression generation must read the present and the future,
does not make them any less ugly, or less difficult to
liquidate.
In my own case I brought some prior recognition of this
fact to my journalistic task. But it seemed to me that al-
most any traveling reporter, even unaided by books, could
feel it in his bones long before he reached the midway

157
158 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT

point of the continent. The very landscape shouts it at

you.
I passed this midway point the second month and moved

into Wisconsin into a social and political landscape which

has been sanitated and vivified for over half a century by
the elder La Follette and his sons, by the Milwaukee
Socialists,and by a State University Brain Trust which,
having boasted John R. Commons and others, is too
sophisticated to boast much about Glenn Frank.
Wisconsin, as I realized almost immediately, was dif-

ferent. Even on the surface it exhibited more political

vitality than any other had been through. And
state I

when I got below the surface I found that the dilemma

of "progress," as I have described it, was one of the fa-
miliar commonplaces of public and private discussion and
had been so, long before the depression.
Wisconsin, at least, knew what it was up against. For
years it had been analyzing its dilemma, stating it and re-
stating it in government reports, graphing it with colored
maps and charts, sloganizing it in political campaigns,
even slowly and painfully embodying a few inadequate
palliatives in legislation. No other state has had so much
"reform." For example, the Pennsylvania Security League,
a political pressure group of labor and middle-class lib-
erals, is now agitating for legislative reforms three-quarters
of which are already on the statute books of Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin public documents which exhibit and
more or less confess the bankruptcy of American "prog-
ress" are radical in their analyses and mildly liberal in
their recommendations. They are parochial in that they
tend to ignore the fact that Wisconsin is inextricably in-
 A CENTURY OF EVASION 159

volved with the general process of national and interna-

tional conflict and disintegration.
Wisconsin is close to the political breaking point, not
because its economic and social dilemma is more acute
than that of many other states (it is, in fact, much less
acute) but because its political development is higher.
Hence the politicians can come close to telling the raw
truth, even in print.
For example, Governor Philip La Follette, in his letter
dated April 20, 1932, acknowledging the report of the
Committee on Land Use and Forestry, already felt suf-
ficiently assured to permit himself the following para-
graph:

We must give a wider meaning and definition to the term

government if we are to emerge successfully from the present

crisis. We are learning that there can be no arbitrary sepa-

ration between a responsible exercise of power and authority

by government officials in the narrow sense and by those who

are engaged in the great basic economic activities, whose
decisions and actions have a decisive influence upon the life
of the community.

It seems to me that a free, but essentially accurate trans-

lation of this ^Esopian language would read somewhat as
follows:

True government must have power commensurate with its

responsibilities. The responsibility of government is to pro-

mote and defend the maximum economic and social welfare
of the total population. To this end the state must have
power to control and use to the best possible advantage of
the whole people the total means of production land, min-
160 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
machinery, labor and talent. The power to gov-
erals, forests,
ern must include the power to govern business and "those
who are engaged in the great basic economic activities" can
be permitted no decisions and actions which handicap govern-
mental officials in the discharge of the responsibilities which
the vote of the people has placed upon them.

My paraphrase becomes clearly a Socialist statement. But

even the Governor's own careful language is Socialist by
implication. Wisconsin had got that far by 1932. "Those
who are engaged in the great basic economic activities"
Wisconsin's super-government of business, in other words
penetrated young Governor La Follette's ^Esopian lan-

guage sufficiently so that in 1934 he had the fight of his

political life to get reelected. Pressed by the rank and file
Progressives, and somewhat against his own will, he had
broken the frail umbilical cord that united him to the

Republican Party. He won by

a narrow margin and
largely, I was told, because the Wisconsin Federation of
Labor, which in 1934 put on more strikes than any other
state has seen and won most of them, threw its weight
with that of the rural progressives and swung the balance
in young Phil's favor. The had a good colorful
Socialists
candidate in George Nelson, the Polk County dirt farmer,
but they trailed badly, because the tradition of Wisconsin
is overwhelmingly
progressive and pragmatic.
But let us return to that report of the Committee on
Land Use and Forestry. It is remarkably thorough and
able, and despite its careful, reserved language, its impli-
cations are full of dynamite. As I read it, I reflected that
a not inappropriate title for such a report would be "A
Century of Evasion."
 A CENTURY OF EVASION 161

The committee was composed of two representatives of

the lumber and related industries, two representatives of
the Federal agencies, and two representatives of the state.
The report was drafted largely by R. B. Goodman, Chair-
man of the Conservation Commission, Raphael Zon, Di-
rector of the Lake States Forest Experiment and
Station,
Professor John M. Gates, Secretary of the Executive Coun-
cil. Here, in my own expanded and
interpreted paraphrase,
are the problems considered by the committee:
i. What to do about the
progressive disemployment of
the 54,000 people, 2 1 per cent of the workers of the state,
who in 1927 were engaged in the forestry industries, in-

cluding such dependent industries as paper, pulp, furni-

ture, etc. The trends at the time the report was written
indicated that between 1937 and 1946 the lumber indus-
try, because of the exhaustion of its raw material, would
be pretty much closing up shop. Since then the depression
has reduced the rate of exhaustion, but should business
pick the liquidation of the forests would be promptly
up
accelerated. Are the lumber companies, which during the

past 75 years have mined the lumber wealth of Wisconsin,

going to support the one-fifth of the working population
set adrift? Can they afford to do so? If not, who is going
to support them, by what means, and at what standard of
living? How much industry and employment could be
salvaged from the wreckage of Wisconsin's basic natural
resource if the lumber companies could be persuaded to
crop the residual forest lands instead of mining them, and
to practicegood forest management? Jack pine, one of the
fastest growing trees, can be cut in 40 years, but on
the basis of such planting a 40,000 acre holding would
162 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
pay only $841 per acre cut and the profit per acre would
be only 21 cents. Will this look like a business to the
timber barons who remember the millions they made out
of mining Wisconsin's magnificent stand of virgin white
pine? Will private industry invest on a forty-year gamble
of this kind and build back the productivity of Wisconsin
timber lands? What about the competition of other areas?
What about wood substitutes and other technological dis-
coveries? Is there any assurance that the wood planted will
be the wood wanted 40, 80, 100 years from now?
2. What about the chain of public bankruptcies town,

county, and state which is entailed by the steady accumu-

lation of tax delinquent land in the hands of public
authorities? If the towns and counties of the cutover re-

gions can no longer support schools, roads, public health

nurses, etc., as they demonstrably cannot, no more can the
state or even the Federal government, if the tax base is
to be destroyed by the exhaustion of physical resources,
the abandonment of agriculture and industry, and the
migration of population.
3. What to do with the subsistence farmers, working
submarginal cutover land, no longer obtaining supple-
mentary employment from the departed lumber mills, liv-
ing on roads the county can't afford to keep up, and
unable to feed and clothe themselves, let alone pay taxes?
Should the state develop more subsistence farming? The
Committee says flatly: "Theoretically, all agricultural
farming should stop and all scattered settlements should
be vacated at once." It also points out that there is really
no such thing as subsistence farming the farmer must
either have supplementary industrial employment or pro-
 A CENTURY OF EVASION 163

duce a cash crop if hepay his taxes. In any case his

is to

agricultural production, even if he consumes it all him-

self, reduces by that much the market of the commercial

cash-crop farmers. The Committee further observes:

"Somehow there a belief that good soil can be made out
is

of submarginal land if only we can get the right farmers

on the land. Too often the right farmer is a man with a
low standard of living."
4. Suppose the state followed the theoretically correct

policy, that of stopping all agricultural settlement and

vacating all scattered settlements: how could such a policy
be effectuated? How
can private land companies, town-
ships, and counties be prevented from selling marginal
land to suckers?
The general question toward which all these detailed

problems lead is the following:

What population can be supported, and at what stand-
ard of living, in a state whose major natural resource of
lumber has been expended and wasted, and the productiv-
ity of whose agricultural land has, partly because of the
denudation of forest cover, been impaired by erosion?
The financial solvency of the state can be restored only
by restoring the solvency of individual agricultural and
industrial producers. But the standard of living of Wis-
consin's citizens, and the standards of its publicly sup-

ported educational, health, road maintenance and other

services were established during the period when Wiscon-
sin was living on, and using up, its rich capital of natural
resources. Moreover, the exploitation of this resource, the

mining, rather than cropping of Wisconsin forests, was a

major factor in building up the treeless prairie states
164 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
Kansas, Iowawhose farm houses and barns were built
with Wisconsin white pine. The Wisconsin farmers must
now compete with the lowans and Kansans whom in the
past they have more or less subsidized with cheap lumber.
Wisconsin can no longer afford to be generous either
to its own citizens or in its attitudes toward its neighbors.
Instead of being first among the lumber producing states,

as was between 1899 and 1904, Wisconsin now ranks

it

fourteenth. Instead of the thousand saw mills of 1890, it

now has about 200. The white pine is gone, even the pulp
wood is almost gone. In 1932 the paper pulp industry had
only enough supplies in the state for one year's consump-
tion and only enough in the adjoining states and Canada
for five years' production. By 1937 this major Wisconsin
industry will have used up its
supplies.
Meanwhile, tax delinquency spreads like a blight, start-
ing in the northern counties and creeping southward. As
early as 1927, the 17 northern counties owned 1,900,000
acres of land which had been secured by tax delinquency
the total acreage of the state being 35 million. By 1930,
Oneida County alone held tax certificates against 35.9 per
cent of its total area and other counties were showing a
similar trend. This terrifying avalanche of cutover, burned
over, eroded, and other submarginal land into the laps of
county, state and Federal authorities has accelerated with
each year of the depression. Nobody knows with any de-

gree of accuracy what the tax delinquent totals are today

in Wisconsin or elsewhere.
When land becomes tax delinquent the bottom drops
out of everything. The narrowed tax base of the better
land, the residual solvent industries, must carry a heavier
 A CENTURY OF EVASION 165

proportionate burden and these owners in turn become

insolvent. Farms are abandoned, the farmers go on relief,
and the remaining occupied farms are impossibly scat-
tered. The per capita expense of schools in some of the
northern, sparsely settled communities rises to as much as
$386 per pupil as against $41 in the more fortunate towns.
Schools are abandoned, roads are neglected. The country
goes back to the wilderness, but a meager, barren wilder-
ness, not the game-filled forest paradise of long ago.
The whole economy operates in reverse: the paupered
township leans on the county, which leans on the state,
which leans on. the Federal government, which leans finan-
cially on the blue sky of a concealed or overt inflation.

Through page after page of this report there sounds the

muted, impotent cry: "Too late, too late." For
Wisconsin,
the happy days ended in 1900, not 1929. By the former

year, approximately, Wisconsin's agriculture had reached

the peak of its development. The best land for farming
had long since been brought into production. Already
the lumber wealth of the state had been pretty much
gutted. But if even at that time reforestation had been
begun, if settlers had been kept off the poor land, the sit-
uation with respect to the lumber industry and the financ-
ing of the rural population would, in the 1930*5, have
been in tolerable shape. Even in 1900 there were far-
sighted men in the government forestry and agricultural
services who pointed this out, who cried, in that cutover
wilderness, for conservation and control. They cried in
vain, for like the present governor of Wisconsin, they had
social responsibility without economic or political power.
i66 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
The lumber barons and the land colonization companies
had the power and used it to promote first their immedi-
ate profit and second the ultimate bankruptcy of one of
the most beautiful, fertile and richly endowed states of
the union.

The report does not say this, except by implication.

It recites the facts and in its brief recommendations makes
a meager best of a bad business. It urges:
1. A
permanent committee on land use to cooperate
with the National Committee on Land Utilization.
2. The
decentralization of forest protection and forest

management through the creation of four northern and

central conservation areas.

3. Increase in the area of public forests both through

purchase and through organization of tax delinquent land

under forest management.
4. The application of the zoning law by local govern-
ments to the end that agricultural land be segregated from
forest, recreational and other wild land.
5. The equalization of assessments as between property
classes, and a fair distribution of government costs.
6. Thesubstitution of a yield tax for the annual prop-

erty tax on mature and growing timber.

The report concludes with the following significant sen-
tence: "If, however, these measures by themselves prove
insufficient in ensuring a sensible utilization of the new
forest crops, then there will be ample time to develop the
more specific recommendations for the safeguarding of
public interests/'
Sufficient? Ample time? The dilemma today, despite
 A CENTURY OF EVASION 167

Wisconsin's relatively high political development, despite

her able progressive governor, despite her numerous
highly trained and devoted public servants is no nearer
solution than it was when this report was written. The
continuation and acceleration of the trends, so expertly
defined by the Committee, are likely to make it worse
even though many of its recommendations, such as zon-

ing and enlargement of state and national forests, have

been carried out. And the Gordian knot of this dilemma-
responsibility without power remains uncut. The way
out for Wisconsin is that indicated in the ^Esopian lan-
guage of the Governor's letter of acknowledgment: the
union of responsibility with power which can only be
achieved by a socialization of the total resources of the
state. That, in turn, since Wisconsin is anything but self-

sufficient, would logically imply the socialization of the

total national economy. And when
the revolution comes, it
will inherit, not a going concern, but the chaotic residue
of a century of evasion, of exploitation, of waste, of social
and political fake and failure.

That is what "progress" looks like a couple of hundred

miles northwest of the Century of Progress Sky Ride. Nor
does it seem much different in any other state of the union.
The by Wis-
essential elements of the description written
consin's Committee on Land Use and Forestry would
apply almost equally to all the lumber states.
And if, for lumber, one substitutes coal, oil, iron and
other national resources, including the primary resource
of arable top-soil and sub-soil moisture, they would
apply
to a score of others.
i68 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
The wonder is, not that at this climax of the Century
of Progress we find our whole economy slipping into re-
verse, but that we should be so surprised and disconcerted

by and freely predicted denouement

this easily predictable
of the American tragi-comedy. In relation to this funda-
mental bankruptcy which is public as well as private,
social and political as well as economic, moral as well as
intellectual which over much of the continent has left
nature herself prostrate and unable to help us we exhibit
about as much dignity and sophistication as a Wall Street
lamb bleating over his stock losses in the aftermath of
Black Thursday.
We are a mob of nouveaux-pauvres, all of us more or
less "on relief" lumber barons as well as lumber jacks,
mill owners as well as mill operatives, tobacco barons as
well as the residents of Tobacco Road all still putting
on the swank of a great and prosperous nation, and all
of us imagining that we still have what it takes, which we
haven't. Some of what it takes we shall never have again
the ravaged virgin timber, the fantastically wasted mineral
resources, the rain- and wind-eroded top soil. But we have
enough of nature left if we can only develop in time the
socialand political disciplines and graces of a civilized
people; that means that we must abandon quickly and
coincidently the obsolete barbarism of industrial capital-
ism and the naive vulgarity of the pioneer, acquisitive
social psychology.
That a large order and nowhere did I see any political
is

grouping that seems likely to deliver it in time. Even in

the politically advanced states of Wisconsin and Minnesota
it seemed to me that the social lags were insuperable; that
 A CENTURY OF EVASION 169

the masses of farmers, workers and middle-class people

were still milling around and in their desperation likely

to attack almost anything except the root of the dilemma

the separation ofpower from responsibility.
Governor La Follette was tugging at that root when he
acknowledged the really hair-raising report whose contents
I have summarized. But he was tugging in the traditional

terms of the democratic dogma expressed in the phrase,

"We, the people." We have never had in
this country any
such identity of interest as is implied in that first person
plural. We have instead an established system, sanctioned
in law and approved by custom in the operation of which
one of the population has been encouraged not
class
but to destroy the very
merely to exploit the other classes,
physiographic base of the continent from which the total
population must ultimately draw its sustenance.
For many months President Roosevelt's liberal critics

have been taking a refined intellectual pleasure in baiting

him because of his inability to make up his mind about
anything. Of course he can't make up his mind not as
as he is bound to the myth of the democratic dogma;
long
not as long as he is bound by the terms of his popular
mandate to essay the impossible task of expressing the will
of a "we" which is no we which is merely the festering
stalemate of pressure groups whose interests are not iden-
tical but conflicting.
It struck me that the democratic dogma would probably
crack at the periphery before it cracks at the center; that
in Wisconsin and Minnesota the necessary class fission was
more or less imminent, although it probably won't happen
soon enough. For before the Northwest gets around to
170 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
consolidating and expressing a "we" that means some-
thinga "we" of farmers, workers and technicians which
deliberately excludes and invalidates the interest of busi-
ness and finance before that happens, the center, urged

by the example of Europe, will probably have cast the

dice for martial suicide in the next war.*
* I submitted this
chapter for correction and criticism to one of the
Wisconsin experts who is thoroughly acquainted with the material. With
his permission, I print the following excerpt from his letter:

". . .
'guts' of the whole report, brought out its eco-
you have got the
nomic implications, and analyzed the situation very realistically. About a
year or so ago I would have fully subscribed to your conclusions. Today, I
do not know. . . .

"It right to talk of 'the responsibility of the government in pro-

is all

moting and defending the maximum economic and social welfare of the
total population.' Is not this exactly what Hitler and Mussolini, as well
as the socialists in general, advocate? It all apparently depends on who
gets there first and assumes that responsibility. In Russia, by an historic
accident, this responsibility fell into the right hands. In Italy, and espe-
cially in Germany, the wrong crowd succeeded in grasping that responsi-
bility.
"With the exception of Wisconsin and possibly one or two other states,
I personally would not trust the state governments to assume such abso-
lute, unchallenged responsibility. Theoretically, and from the standpoint
of efficiency, such a principle is correct. At the present state of mind of
our population, I am afraid the granting of such power could mean
nothing but a step toward fascism. Until the people in this country are
ripe to entrust such a responsibility to a truly representative government,
I prefer to 'muddle through' with our democracy. At least, under such a
democracy, we would not lose the few liberties we still have, and ex-
change them for a 'mess of pottage,' even if we should get that."
The book context in which this chapter falls will indicate that I agree
pretty fully with the writer of this comment. In posing the contradiction
of responsibility without power, I did not mean to suggest that the con-
tradiction could be resolved within the framework of the capitalist so-
ciety. Fascism, in my view, combines the maximum of power with the
maximum of irresponsibility, and the domestic and international chaos
which ultimately precipitates is far more difficult to liquidate than the
it

confusions of the quasi-democratic states.

 14
HOW RADICAL ARE THE FARMERS?

DROVE some two thousand miles through the agricul-

I tural regions of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Da-
kota. I talked to scores of farmers, as well as to educators,

agricultural economists, journalists, farmer-business men

connected with the producers' and consumers' coopera-
tives, and miscellaneous citizens. In addition I attended
two conventions of the Farmers Educational and Coopera-
tive Union the Wisconsin state convention at Wasau, and
the national convention at Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
For over half a century the radical agrarians of the
Northwest have been rolling up thunder clouds of protest
and agitation, and now and then discharging them in a
sparse rainfall of political and economic action, quickly
absorbed and frustrated by the advancing conquests of
industrial capitalism. Meanwhile, for reasons already indi-
cated, both the physiographic and economic bases of the
Northwest have been getting drier and drier.
In spite of these cumulative pressures, this radical agrari-
it seems to me, is still hobbled
anism, by the obsolete
economics of populism and by the obstinate parochialism
of the pioneer-competitive social psychology. They realize,

many of these agrarian leaders, that, as Louis Hacker has

pointed out, "the farmer is doomed" by all the forces of
finance capital, technological rationalization, and New
171
172 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
Deal cartelization; what they do not realize is that the
doom of the farmer is no unique and invidious destiny,
but merely one of the major consequences of the inability
of the capitalist economy either to finance domestic con-

sumption or to fructify foreign trade. The politics, even

of the more advanced wing of the organized farmers, is
still nationalist, isolationist; their psychology is still that
of ragged, angry, dispossessed and jealous small capitalists.
The danger of this condition, in view of the steady trend
toward state capitalism and fascism, is apparent enough. I
even encountered here and there the characteristic dema-
gogic formulations of fascism, including anti-Semitism.
To set against this, however, we have the full-throated
verbal rejection of the AAA
scarcity promotion program
by the Farmers Union and the Farm Holiday Association;
also the increasing currency of such phrases as "the co-

operative commonwealth" and "production for use" un-

implemented, however, by any clear-headed tactical for-
mulas. At the Wisconsin convention I even heard some
rather astonishing versions of the class struggle in agrarian
terms. Here is a sample:
"You are a class, Brothers and Sisters, a class of slaves,
a voiceless herd of cattle. For years you have understood
that you were the slaves of society. Why else have you edu-
cated John or Mary to be a doctor, a teacher, a business
man anything but a farmer or a farmer's wife? You have
sent the best minds, the best spirits to the city, and have
left the worst on the farm to become the future peons of

America. What makes you think you have anything in

common with these bankers, business men, Rotarians?
They are a class; they know it, and organize as a class.
 How RADICAL ARE THE FARMERS? 173

Well, it's time you did the same thing. You've got to take
out a card in a militant farm union."
Itsounds like the anarchist Galleani in his best rabble-
rousing manner. But the speaker is Charles Talbot, presi-
dent of the North Dakota Farmers Union. He owns a big
ranch near Jamestown, North Dakota. He is no peon.
In Russia they would class him a kulak, or even a landed
proprietor. And at the national convention at Sioux Falls,
South Dakota, two weeks after that speech, he was standing
with the right wing of the convention, which wanted to
placate the secedent Nebraska union by yielding to its de-
mand that Edward E. Kennedy, the national secretary, be
replaced. The
right wing lost when
the candidacy of Gal
Ward, Kansas president, for the national vice presidency,
was ruled out on the ground that a Farmers Union state
official who got more of his income from the government
than he did from the union was not eligible to hold a
national office. (Ward had been paid $15 a day by the AAA
for his services in putting over the corn-hog acreage reduc-
*
tion program.) In the convention fight the expletives 'pay-
roller" and "bird-dog" were freely used in the lobbies and
even on thefloor. But Fritz Shulheis, retiring National
Board member, who was active in the fight against the
right-wingers, himself holds the position of Deputy Com-
missioner of Agriculture in Wisconsin, having been put
there more or less at the demand of the Wisconsin Farm-
ers Union. And both right wing and left
wing spokesmen
were equally eloquent in denouncing the scarcity-promo-
tion program of Secretary Wallace and in demanding "cost
of production," government financing of farm loans, and
agricultural embargoes. I was obliged to conclude, there-
174 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
fore, that farmers* conventions, like labor conventions,
are highly political, that the strife of leaders is intense,
and that as between right, center and left only a highly
sophisticated reporter could be sure which was which; also
that they were all well to the right of anything that could
be described as revolutionary radicalism.
From the New Deal point of view, Milo Reno repre-
sents the left of the farmers' movement. It was he who put
Gal Ward on the spot in the national convention and no
one denounced more loudly the program of the triple A.
Well, I pursued Brother Reno to his hotel, scratched his
radicalism and underneath found both fundamentalism
and anti-Semitism.
Reno is an ex-farmer-preacher in his middle sixties, with
the canny eyes of a politician; his "grass-roots," I suspect,
have long since been withered by the hot wind of his con-
scious or unconscious demagoguery. Cost of production,
remonetization of embargoes on agricultural prod-
silver,
uctshe was emphatically for the Farmers Union line, as
well as some eccentric side lines such as his opposition to
the government's destruction of tubercular cattle. But, I
asked, did he not think that socialization of the land would
ultimately be necessary? No. That would be Communism,
and he was against Communism.
"I'm a believer in the Bible," said Brother Reno. "We
don't want Communism in this country. It breeds pagan-
ism. It did in Germany, didn't it?"

Nazism from Commu-

I tried earnestly to differentiate

nism, but with no success they were all the same thing

to Milo Reno. I also pointed out that Nazism had bred

not only a rococo paganism, but also, and more impor-
 How RADICAL ARE THE FARMERS? 175

tantly, anti-Semitism. What did Brother Reno think about

that? Why, at the session of the convention just concluded,
had he referred publicly to the New Deal as the "Jew
Deal." At which Brother Reno closed up. There is plenty
of Nazi propaganda, including the mythical Semitic geneal-

ogies for American statesmen, the "protocols of Zion," etc.,

being slipped into R.F.D. mail boxes throughout the
Middle West and Northwest. Maybe Brother Reno has no
connection with this agitation, but it is entirely in line
with his fundamentalist prejudices.
The more I talked to Brother Reno, the more I found
myself thinking of Wilbur Glenn Voliva, whom I had in-
terviewed in Zion City. Wilbur also believes in the literal
truth of the Bible. Moreover, he believes, or pretends to
is flat. On
believe, that the earth top of this he believes in
some kind of ecclesiastical cooperative
commonwealth, al-
though the cooperatively produced peanut brittle I bought
in the Zion restaurant was not good. Wilbur wears a
pre-
historic boiled shirt with foot-long cuffs that stick out at

you like cannon when you sit opposite him. I had to go

through two secretaries and three deacons before I was
privileged to interview the prophet. The top of his head
was dusty, like the white-maned head of Bryan in his last,
fundamentalist-real-estate period.
Wilbur, I noted, reads the papers. He says he gets his
prophecies of doom out of the Bible, but I think he gets
them out of the papers. The little boys in Zion City speak
slightingly of the prophet. They refer to his tabernacle as
the "White Dove Movie Palace." I think the
prophet knew
that I knew that he didn't believe in his
prophecies, or
care much. A seedy, dusty, dated showman, but useful by
176 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
way of reminding us that fundamentalism, with its cult
aberrations, still lives, and must be watched out for.
Reno is much
abler, more honest and more
of course a

important figure. In his time he has been a fighter, a

leader ahead of his crowd, and in some respects he still is.
None the seemed to me that his variegated igno-
less, it

rances and prejudices were highly dangerous. If the farm-

ers want to go anywhere except into fascism they had bet-
ter get rid of Milo Reno.
I saw no evidence that the Holiday Association shares

Reno's anti-Semitism, and some evidence that it is, in gen-

eral, to the left of national president. Of all the farmers'
its

meetings I attended, the most impressive was a conference

of delegates from the drought-stricken counties of western
Minnesota, organized by John Bosch, President of the
Minnesota Farm Holiday Association, to petition Gov-
ernor Olson for more help than the FERA and the AAA
were giving them. For the better part of a day they
matched facts and arguments with the state relief ad-
ministrator and came out better than even. Not, however,
with more stock feed, which was what they wanted. There
was no money for that. They warned that the farmers had
only two or three days' feed ahead for their stock; that if
the snow came and covered what was left of their meager
forage, the farmers would probably take by force what
littleroughage there was stored in the region. (They did
precisely that in Appleton, Minnesota, a few days later.)
This man, you might guess, must have been a thor-
oughly class-conscious farmer. I visited him later at his
farm near Montevideo. House, barns, and land were well
kept. Here again was no peon. He told me that he had
 How RADICAL ARE THE FARMERS? 177

been a dealer in land in Iowa and had lost out in the

"landslide" a few years ago. He had salvaged enough to
make a good payment on 200 acres of Minnesota land and
had done reasonably well until the dry years came. As
business man and farmer, alternately and both together,
he was more or less typical of the membership not merely
of the Farmers Union but of the Holiday Association.
That is why it is hard to make the phrase, "class conscious-
ness," mean anything as applied to farmers. Farmers are in
business. Farmers are also traders, capitalists, land specu-
latorsbroke speculators, oppressed and dispossessed capi-
talists, if you like, but still pretty much dominated by the

individualist business man's psychology. Moreover the gen-

eric word "farmer" includes a multitude of species: the
Wisconsin freeholder, the southern share-cropper, the
western fruit tramp, the shipper-growers of California's
Imperial Valley and elsewhere, the Mexican and Filipino
peons used by these farming corporations.
The conflicts implicit in these divergencies of status are
as apparent in the Northwest as elsewhere. Why, for ex-

ample, doesn't the Holiday Association, most of whose

members also belong to the Farmers Union, merge with
the latter organization? Because the Holiday Association
is not in business, owns no
property, and is consequently
footloose, whereas the Farmers Union is tied to the com-

plex structure of producers' and consumers' cooperatives,

most of which center in St. Paul and Chicago. The mem-
bers of the Holiday Association describe themselves cheer-

fully as the "scrub women" Farmers Union. It is

for the

they who stop evictions and

stage milk strikes. And it is

they, significantly, who join forces with organized labor,

178 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
as recently when the Minnesota Holiday Association fed
the striking truck drivers of Minneapolis. As for the Farm-
ers Union, as late as the convention of 1924 it came close
to passing a resolution deploring the use of the strike as a

weapon in labor disputes. It has traveled leftward since

then, but not as far as one might suppose.
The farmers are in business. The Sioux Falls conven-
tion passed a resolution introduced by the delegate from
California, K. V. Garrod, who is incidentally a member
of the California State Board of Agriculture, opposing
"unreasonable rules applied by the Food and Drug Asso-
ciation for the protection of the consumer." The trouble
was about prune juice, a designation for the new product
of the California Prune Growers Association which the
Food and Drug Administration objected to. There were
a few objections to the effect that the consumers ought to
know what the cooperative prune growers put in the
bottle, but the resolution passed. Even more significant
was the split-up of the Minnesota union two years ago,
caused by the inability of the "educational" that is to say,

political-organizational-legislativepart of Farmers
the
Educational and Cooperative Union to get along with the
cooperative part, which consisted of the Farmers Union
Central Exchange, Live Stock Commission, and Grain
Corporation.
A word about these cooperatives. Radical phrases such
as the "cooperative commonwealth" are imbedded in their
constitution and declarations of principles. But with the
possible exception of the Finnish cooperatives in north-
western Minnesota they seem to be anything but class-

conscious, and many of the cooperative leaders make a

 How RADICAL ARE THE FARMERS? 179

point of being non-political as a matter of principle. The

Finns have a small string of cooperative stores centering
in Cloquet, Minnesota, and in this region have more or
less completed the circuit of producer and consumer co-

operatives.For them, cooperation has a social and cultural

content derived from their old country tradition; only
with great difficulty is any such content injected into the
American cooperatives. The Finns don't understand this.

A while back, at a cooperative meeting, a disgusted Finn

exclaimed: "You Americans think a cooperative is some-
thing to make money out of." That is
pretty much what
they do think. And in a Farmer-Labor state, Minnesota,
non-political philosophy of the cooperatives raises some
curious contradictions. For example, the head of the Land
O' Lakes Butter Cooperative is a leading Republican Stal-
wart, who was almost induced to run for Governor against
Olson.
The cooperatives, especially the consumer cooperatives
founded on the cooperative distribution of gasoline and
oil, have been flourishing during the depression, and one
does not wish in the least to discount their significance.
As money-saving enterprises, and as economic arms of the
Farmers Union, they have contributed aid especially the
check-off of Farmers Union dues as well as embarrass-
ment. But it is not unfair to say that the growth of these
organizations, in their present form, and limited by their
present philosophy, cannot be taken, in and of itself, as an
index of the spread of radicalism among the farmers.
The Farmers Union Youth Movement otherwise
known as the "Juniors" will be a better index when and
if it
really gets going. The Juniors were very much in the
180 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
foreground both at Wasau and at Sioux Falls. They sang
and recited and danced, and produced the inevitable

pageant with a stage populated by the personified abstrac-

tions of Truth, Justice, and so on. A chorus of farm boys
in overalls and red bandannas sang:

Don't go to the left,

Don't go to the right,

But right in the middle of the road.

Artistically, some of the numbers exhibited an unfortu-

nate miscegenation of Broadway and the prairies. But
others were pretty good, and on the whole the Juniors
were impressive. The report of the Junior chairman stated:

If we are forced to abandon capitalism we must adopt an-

other system of economics; there is but one path open to a
free people, and that is the collectivism of cooperation. It is

imperative that our children understand how to use the prin-

ciples of cooperation as the only known defense against a
dictatorship of capital with its impending rule of terror,
sabotage and war.

What kind of radicalism is this, and is it likely to de-

velop an organization and a tactic adequate to deal with
the economic and social dilemma of the farmers? Only
the future can answer.
Meanwhile it may be said that on the showing of the
Sioux Falls convention the farmers are making progress.
No new developed, and the national secretary re-
splits

ported the organization of new state unions in Alabama,

Michigan, Indiana and Ohio, with a combined new mem-
bership of 40,000; also fifteen other states in process of
 How RADICAL ARE THE FARMERS? 181

organization. All factions represented at the convention

united in opposing the crop-reduction program of the
AAA and in demanding that when the government takes
plebiscites of the farmers it give them a chance to vote
for a cost of production as against a crop-reduction pro-

gram.
But the most impressive thing about these farmers'
meetings was the farmers who attended them. They are
not peons yet; they are not as dumb as they like to call
themselves; and most of them the younger ones especially
have stopped being fundamentalists. There are better,
more realistic, ideas being brewed under the surface than
appear in the Farmers Union line. What with one thing
and another, I reflected, it looks like more trouble ahead
for Secretary Wallace.*
* A radical agricultural economist supplies the following footnote to this
chapter:

What you are talking about here, of course, is capitalist farmers, who
are the articulate agricultural groups and who operate largely in the
northwest. It must be kept clearly in mind that there are two other
major capitalist classes in the United States:
1. The agricultural laborers.
2. The farmers who have small debts (because they do
smaller farmers
not produce primarily for markets) and small cash incomes. At least half
the farmers in the United States belong in this category. These farmers
cannot be interested in the financial programs of the capitalist farmers:
cost of production, moratoria, etc.
These two groups can be radicalized or neutralized; the capitalist farmer
I am suspicious of. And "cost of
production" can be turned so easily into
a fascist slogan. The workers would hold the bag with higher prices.
 15
THE TERRIBLE SWEDE

A POLITICIAN is a specialist. He clings to the second

hand of the political clock, and the political reporter,
also a specialist, must gyrate along with him and pretend
that he is going somewhere. A
radical labor leader, by
benefit of Marx, Lenin, and a good deal more
others, is

impressive. He at least rides the minute hand of the class

struggle and watches the hour hand of the total economic

and social situation.
Theclock was striking in Minnesota when I was there,
right after the election, but nobody could tell me what
time it was. Least of all, Floyd Bjornsterne Olson.
Mr. Olson wished he knew. For sound, practical, politi-
cal reasons, he would have given a good deal to know. He
is one of the cleverest and, I suspect, one of the shallow-

est men in public life today. He knows something about

those three hands of the clock and he wanted terribly, did
that Terrible Swede, to know what time it was.
He asked me and I asked him. He put his long legs on
his desk in the Governor's office, glanced at the late after-
noon sun, and tried out his political sextant on us me,
and the Associated Press and United Press reporters who
shared the interview. Says the Governor:
"I am for the Roosevelt administration when as and if

it
puts through a program of social legislation that may be
182
 THE TERRIBLE SWEDE 183

a stepping-stone to the Cooperative Commonwealth. But

if the farmers of the Middle West and Northwest don't
get
parity I
equality of treatment with the
prefer to call it

industrialists I expect to participate in an agrarian politi-

cal revolt which in 1936 will bring a third party into the
national arena and shatter all existing political align-
ments."
Nobody is hurt yet, no crockery is broken and no bridges
are burned. We still don't know what time it is. The Ter-
rible Swede has got to do better than that, I reflect, or my
editor will be disappointed. So I prod him with the first
stick that comes to hand.
What about the extension of the FERA production proj-
ects, I asked. What would
Minnesota, the center of the
cooperative movement of the Northwest, do with these
projects, and what would they lead to? Could these enter-

prises be made the nucleus of a production-for-use econ-

omy would eventually displace the profit economy?
that
saw immediately that I had led right into the Gov-
I

ernor's hand. He had just been reflected for his third term
on a platform so loaded with Socialistic verbalisms that a
careful "interpretation" of its more alarming pronounce-
ments was gotten out to soothe the apprehensions of
Olson's more conservative
constituents. That platform,

adopted during the Governor's absence and written largely

by that ebullient ex-preacher Howard Y. Williams, had
given Olson a good many headaches during the campaign-
it had cut his previous majority in half. But he had won
out, nevertheless, and now a modicum would
of leftism
be good political capital, especially in Washington.
184 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
Would Minnesota push ahead, gradually, left of the
New on the road to state socialism?
Deal,
''That's what I'd like to do," declared the Governor.
"That's my hellish purpose. Of course, I don't know what
the FERA has in mind. [Neither did anybody else, includ-

ing the FERA, I reflected.] I'll know more about that when
I get back from Washington."
The Governor pointed out that in Minnesota the co-
operative enterprises have shown a smaller percentage of
failure than businesses operated for profit. It would be

logical, therefore, for the government to put money and

effort into building up these enterprises.
But I didn't intend to let him off as easily as that. Some-
what unkindly, I pointed out that the idle factories taken
over by the FERA
for purposes of mattress-making, fur-

niture-making, canning, etc., were, in Minnesota as else-

where, marginal factories; that the workers in these fac-
torieswere selected not on the basis of training or effi-
ciency but on the basis of need; that my observations in
Ohio and elsewhere had convinced me that the FERA had
in mind, if anything, not the erection of a production-for-
use economy, manned by the depression bloc of extra-
economic relief clients, which would ultimately displace
the profit economy, but merely the reduction of the relief
load. That was to be accomplished, theoretically, by mak-
ing the relief workers insulated by a cordon sanitaire
from the surrounding profit economy and exchanging
their gertrudes, comforters, mattresses, canned foods, etc.,

by a primitive system of barter feed, clothe, and furnish

themselves. But even if the local Chambers of Commerce
didn't kill off those production-for-use, government-subsi-
 THE TERRIBLE SWEDE 185

dized rabbits in their infancy, as they were at that moment

trying with great earnestness to do the relief load
wouldn't be reduced. Because the resultant narrowing of
the market for the products of commercially employed
workers would progressively ripen a new crop of relief
clients, at the same time depleting the taxable solvency of
the commercial employers.
Olson admitted most of this. But Minnesota, he thought,
might be different.
"Depending upon how the FERA operates these fac-
tories," he said, "it may be possible to compete in effi-

ciency with commercial management, especially since the

workers will have the social incentive of producing for
themselves rather than for the profit of the owner. Also,
under the police power, it is possible to do indirectly many
things which are incidental to the preservation of health
and welfare which it is not possible to do directly. I think
it would be
possible legally to take over factories and sell
the goods produced on the open market. It would start as
a relief measure and end as a reemployment measure, since
the public welfare requires reemployment."
As for the cooperatives, the Governor believed that if

were established for basic agricultural com-

fixed prices
moditiesthe Farmers Union line then the cooperative
movement would expand irresistibly.
"The packers would not be able to stop them, then," he
declared. "The trouble with the AAA, and with that ami-
able philosopher Henry Wallace, is that every plan has
ttfconform to the capitalistic pattern. The Farmer-Labor
Party does not suffer this limitation. We are neither allied
i86 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
with nor indebted to capitalism. Our base is the workers,
the farmers, the cooperatives."
All of which I had no difficulty in recognizing as a kind
of political, quasi-Social Democratic hot-cha enough to

get Olson headlines in the morning papers, but nothing

more. I did not express my skepticism to the Governor,
especially as I was pretty sure he knew better. In his youth
he was a Wobbly, and he has swallowed a considerable
smattering of Marxian economics in his time. But he
doesn't intend to be pushed off the clock face, and his

perch is on that gyrating second hand. As to what time it

was in Minnesota, he was sure only of this: that it was no
time for an aspiring politician he will run for the Senate
in 193610 do much more than make fierce Populist faces.
That was safe enough, especially as the Farmer-Labor
Party had failed to elect a majority in either the Assembly
or the Senate, and Olson would therefore have an excel-
lent alibi for any post-election neglect of his platform
promises.

In the interest of accuracy, and without any particular

animus, I am obliged to describe Olson as a
political real-
ist and careerist. The role is more or less inevitable for any

politician who attempts to ride the second hand of the

clock, and its requirements are indeed very arduous.
In many respects, the Terrible Swede
Swede he is half
and half Norwegian, an admirable combination for Min-
nesotans is well equipped to play this role. He is a bril-
liant campaigner, his best asset being his complete lack of
the conventional statesman's front that and his excep-
tional physical equipment. He is six feet two, broad-shoul-
 THE TERRIBLE SWEDE 187

dered, slim-hipped, built like a prize fighter. A

few hours
before my interview I had seen him stride into a meeting
of delegates from the primary drought area of southwest-
ern Minnesota, who had been organized and brought to
St. Paul by John Bosch, president of the Farmers Holiday

Association.

They had just finished proving to the Minnesota relief

director that the FERA stock feed allowance of $25 a
month for the "subsistence herd" of ten units was absurdly

inadequate; that if it were not increased, thousands of

cattle were likely to die in the Northwest this winter; that,
as one thoroughly informed and thoroughly exasperated
farmer put it, "Washington must treat this thing as a
calamity, not as a plaything.'*
The relief director had no answer to this other than that
the allotment of funds from Washington did not permit a
larger allowance. Neither had Olson. Admitting the di-
lemma, he pointed out, first that Minnesota had been
treated with relative generosity by the FERA; second that
there was no use discussing procedure until there was
money to proceed with. As for their demand that the allot-
ment and the "subsistence herd" be increased the aver-
age farm in southern Minnesota is no subsistence home-
stead, but a normally productive unit of 160 acres he was
with them on that. He would take their resolutions to
Washington and argue for them.
There was small comfort in this for the farmers and they
knew it. Yet they obviously felt that Olson was their friend.
And when one of the women delegates said something
about it being the Governor's forty-third birthday, they all
rose and cheered.
i88 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
From everything that I saw and heard of Olson I was
inclined to believe that he is temperamentally a radical
his sympathies are with workers and farmers rather than
with big business. But he is primarily a career man in
practical politics. Which means that he is bound to behave
like any other radical holding office in a capitalist state.
In dealing with him the workers and farmers can count,
like thePullman porter in the song, on getting sympathy,
but that is about all. Being a career man, he is not willing
to drop off the clock face or even to take serious chances.
His political credo printed in the April, 1935, issue of
Common Sense says this, insofar as it says anything. And
a few months after that credo was written he said
again, it

by implication, when he was too busy to attend the third

party convention that launched the American Common-

wealth Political Federation. Mr. Farley can't elect a Demo-
cratic Senator from Minnesota, so he is willing to help elect
Olson, if the Governor refrains from rocking the boat.
One may safely predict that Mr. Olson will refrain.
 16
PUSHING THE MINUTE HAND

second hand of politics, in Minnesota, as else-

THE where, is minute hand of the class strug-

geared to the
gle and to the hour hand of the total economic and social
situation. Olson is a highly intelligent politician and
knows this. What he did during the Minneapolis truck
drivers' strike was pretty much what he had to do, in order
to safeguard his political career. The radicals who consti-
tuted the militant leadership of Local 574, International
Teamsters Brotherhood, A. F. of L., were not merely rid-
ing the minute hand, but pushing it, and the Farmer-

Labor Governor, dependent for reelection on the labor

vote of the Twin Cities, was in a tight spot.
Much water has flowed under the bridges of the Twin
Cities since the strike was settled. But a brief summary of
what happened and why it happened should be useful to
those who know only what they read in the newspapers.
Similar things have happened since in Minnesota and else-
where and will continue to happen, for similar reasons.
In February, 1934, Local 574 pulled out the coal truck
drivers after a three-day strike won a complete vic-
and
tory. Following this victory all kinds of drivers employed
by gasoline stations, warehouses, paper houses, transfer
companies, and department stores streamed into Local 574,
and on May 15 the union struck for recognition and wage
189
190 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
increases. time it was apparent that the Minne-
By this

apolis employers were faced by formidable opponents.

Here is how the Minneapolis Tribune described the strike
headquarters in the May strike:

The strike headquarters that the General Drivers Union

has established at 1900 Chicago are everything but a fort, and
might easily be converted into that if the occasion should
arise. A huge garage that chanced to be vacant has been

rented until further notice. The garage offices have been

. . .

converted into the strike office, with desks, typewriters and

stenographers. The space alongside the office is to be equipped
as a commissary, in which the union members on picket duty
will be fed. Much of the garage space will be needed for a
fleet of cars that the union is mobilizing to
carry officials and
members about the city on strike business. And the fleet

already a big one and growing bigger. At the rear of the

is

building, room has been set aside for mass meetings. stage A
has been erected and scores of benches installed.

To this description should be added the later addition

of a hospital and broadcasting system; a mechanical repair

department; supplementary field headquarters set up at

points of vantage; stationary picket posts; cruising picket

lines; a daily newspaper, The Organizer, with its daily edi-
tions of 13,000 which continuously checkmated the propa-

ganda of the employer-controlled press of the Twin Cities.

On May 22, a picket line of 5,000 captured the Market
district; on the following day the union announced a set-
tlement with de facto recognition, unconditional reinstate-
ment of all and an agreement
strikers to arbitrate the
demands for wages and hours.
 PUSHING THE MINUTE HAND 191

The negotiations broke down on the question of the

"inside workers" platform men, chicken pickers, banana
handlers whom Local 574 had taken into its membership.
The employers immediately saw the implied threat: if

574 took in chicken pickers and fruit handlers, what was

there to prevent their encompassing the entire body of

unorganized workers in the city, building a union, a one-

big-union, that would hold the destinies of Minneapolis
in its
powerful hands?
The Twin
City newspapers launched a red scare, quot-
ing from the New Militant to prove that "Trotzkyists"
dominated the strike leadership. The employers refused
to recognize the right of 574 to negotiate for the inside

workers, and the union replied by calling a new strike for

July 16, in spite of the repudiation by Dan Tobin, presi-
dent of the International Teamsters Union, of the mili-
tant leaders of Local 574.
From the first day of the strike, the 15,000 trucks that

normally rolled through the streets of Minneapolis were

tied up "tighter than a bull's eye in fly time." But the em-

ployers too were well organized around a long established

strike-breaking agency called the Citizens Alliance. They
staged a violent comeback. Here is Governor Olson's ac-
count of what happened:

On July 20, the police of Minneapolis, convoying a truck

containing a small amount of merchandise, opened fire with
riot guns upon the crowd of persons who had
gathered at the
scene in order to picket the movement of the truck or as

bystanders. Before the shooting had ended some 50 persons

had been shot, 40 of whom were shot in the back while fleeing
192 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
from the scene of disorder. Two of the persons so shot after-
ward died as a result of the wounds inflicted. Shortly after the
shooting I proclaimed martial law in the city of Minneapolis
for the purpose of protecting the citizens thereof, and for the

purpose of restoring law and order.

There isno question that "Bloody Friday" was a delib-

erate massacre of unarmed workers. There is also no ques-
tion that the entrance of the National Guard did just what
the strike leaders feared it would do it broke the back-
bone of the strike. From that moment on the union was
fighting desperately with its back against the wall.
Politically the Governor was in an almost equally dif-
According to his own professions, he tried
ficult position.
to use the National Guard not merely to preserve "law
and order" but to force a recalcitrant minority of the em-
ployers, led by the bank-controlled Citizens Alliance, to
accept the award of the Federal mediators the Haas-Dun-
nigan agreement which the union had already accepted.
But the National Guard officers had their own ideas about
that many of their officers were either members of the
Citizens Alliance or in close sympathy with the banks and
the employers. The permit system which the Governor
set up was continuously violated. Before the militia came
in, practically no trucks moved; after they came in, hun-
dreds moved.
That was the answer, from the point of view of the
strike leaders, who had protested from the beginning
against the calling in of the National Guard and continu-
ously demanded its withdrawal. Faced with the slow
Strangulation of the strike, the union on August i an-
 PUSHING THE MINUTE HAND 193

nounced the renewal of forceful picketing. And at four

o'clock the next morning the Governor shook the faith
of his most loyal labor supporters by raiding the strike

headquarters and arresting the strike leaders. This was

followed by a raid on the headquarters of the Central
Labor Union.
A roar of protest went up. Some of the Governor's own
political supporters threatened desertion. The union
wielded the threat of a general strike and the next day
the strike leaders were released, headquarters were re-
turned to the strikers, and Colonel McDevitt of the Na-
tional Guard made an apology to the officers of the Cen-
tral Labor Union.
The minute hand and the second hand had jammed
and the acrobatic exercises of the Governor increased in
fervor. He ordered his personal aide-de-camp to raid the
headquarters of the Citizens Alliance. Most of the records
had been removed three days before, but enough was left
to prove that this organization was acting in defiance of
both state and Federal authorities; also that it controlled
the Chief of Police of Minneapolis and was therefore in-

directly responsible for "Bloody Friday."

However, all this didn't alter the fact that the National
Guard, no matter what the Governor felt about it, was
in town to break the strike, and it came close to doing

just that. It set up a military stockade and threw into it

167 strike leaders and pickets. It arrested strikers who at-
tempted to sell the union's daily strike paper. It even
jailed the union's doctor.
A third Federal mediator, P. A. Donoghue, turned up,
and offered a settlement substantially identical with the
194 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
old Haas-Dunnigan agreement, except that the wage pro-
vision gave the strikers two and one-half cents an hour
less 50 cents for drivers and 40 cents for inside workers.

The employers and the union signed up and the strike

was over. I was told that the Governor had brought to bear
some remote political pressure to effect this settlement;
Washington, at the Governor's urgency, had suggested to
the Twin Cities that the strike was too expensive politi-
cally, as well as otherwise.
One of the most significant episodes of the strikes was
the ill-fated adventure of the "Law and Order Committee'*
of 1,500 salesmen, clerks, and patriotic golfers whom the
Citizens Alliance mobilized to break the May strike. They
armed themselves with baseball bats and went into battle
with the trained picket squads of Local 574. The issue of
this battle was never in doubt. The truck drivers drove
them into alleysand houses, took their bats away from
them, and slugged them with simple proletarian hearti-
ness. Within a few minutes these minute men of business
were stripping off their badges, hiding behind cops, and
pretending with panic-stricken earnestness to be innocent
bystanders. Months afterward I talked to a bald and
elderly shopkeeper who had witnessed this skirmish. He
shook with laughter in describing it, even though the
casualties included the deaths of two of the minute men.
He remarked cheerfully that the best men had won. Evi-
dently his reaction was more or less typical of majority
opinion in the Twin Cities. Otherwise Olson would hardly
have been able to treat the episode as brusquely as he did
in the following passage of his campaign speeches:
 PUSHING THE MINUTE HAND 195
In an effort to carry out their program [according to Olson,
the crushing of the entire organized labor movement in Min-
neapolis] the Citizens Alliance, operating through a so-called
Law and Order Committee, induced some 1,500 citizens of
Minneapolis to become special officers. Most of the men so
enlisted were led to believe that they had a patriotic duty to
enlist, equal to the patriotic duty of enlisting in a war. They
were unaware that they were being used as scapegoats for the
Citizens Alliance in order to keep the drivers from attaining
a decent wage. They were unorganized; they were not drilled;
they lacked any leadership; they were pushed into armed con-
flict with men made muscular by hard work rather than
by
sitting in offices; and unfortunately, two of them were killed
and a number injured.

For many weeks, during the summer of 1934, Minne-

apolis had trembled on the verge of civil war, and a "radi-
cal" labor governor had found himself on the spot occu-

pied by any politician, regardless of the color of his label,

who takes office in a capitalist state. The strikers, in the
end, had to fight both their bosses and the forces of "law
and order," including the Farmer- Labor Governor. And
Olson had to twist and squirm out of the tight spot as best
he could. In justice to the Terrible Swede, it must be said
that plenty of other "radical" elected officials have done
much worse. He doubled his labor vote in the Twin Cities
that fall, which partly made up for the votes he lost in
the up-state counties. So that, as a politician, it may be
said that he won a rather ragged victory.
From the point of view of the strikers, however, Olson's
intervention cost them dearly. They had to fight harder,
and they won less: a minimum settlement which the em-
196 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT

ployers promptly undertook to chisel; a militant prestige

which brought its immediate consequences in the form of
persecution by the swivel chair bureaucrats of the Interna-
tional Teamsters. Within less than a year, Dan Tobin, the
International President, had revoked Local 574/8 char-
ter. . . .

When was in Minneapolis, the leaders of 574 were

I

still busy pushing the minute hand so busy that they had
little time for even a sympathetic reporter. When I saw

Vincent Dunne, he was busy responding to the call of the

Fargo, N. D., milk drivers who had struck and wanted
help from Local 574; his brother, Micky Dunne, with a
squad of trained picket leaders, had already left for the
scene.
Vincent Dunne
a slightly built, leanly muscular work-
is

man in his early forties, with the brow and eyes of an Irish
intellectual. Both the second hand of politics and the hour
hand of the economic and social situation had felt the
push of Vince Dunne's finely disciplined energy. The
Citizens Alliance hated him deliriously; the Governor
and his entourage of miscellaneous liberals and ex-Social-
ists were both exasperated by and respectful of Dunne's
cool intransigence.
I asked Dunne what he thought the time of day was in

Minnesota and his answer rather startled me. He thought

that we were within two or three years of a decisive em-

ployer-worker show-down. But later, when I had a look at

the hour hand of Minnesota's total economic and social
situation, I was inclined to think he might be right.
It seemed clear that the maturing of the economic di-

lemma through successive phases of partial recovery and

 PUSHING THE MINUTE HAND 197

deeper crisis would make more and more untenable the

hopelessly confused position of Olson's or any other
Farmer-Labor administration. The strike had mercilessly

exposed the nature of the capitalist state power and its

inevitable role in any crisis. Just as Ramsay MacDonald's
Labor government, burdened with the job of juggling
the multiplying contradictions of the English imperialist
economy, was obliged to move steadily right, so Min-
nesota's fusion of populist-minded farmers and A. F. of L.-
minded labor would find itself holding the bag for capital-
ism. Strike struggles would move up to the point of insur-
rection and recede; the naive radicalism of the more mili-
tant farmers would expend itself in futile violence. This
process might be interrupted by war or by fascism or by
both. In the end it would take the path of social revolu-
tion, but how or when it seemed impossible to predict.
 17
THE HOUR HAND AND "PLANNING"

Wisconsin, Minnesota knows, or should know,

EKE what it is up against. It, too, has mapped and charted
its social and economic dilemma with sufficient complete-
ness to rule out any easy reformist solutions. Much of this

ground-work has been done by some of the same people

who performed a similar service for Wisconsin in the re-
port of the Committee on Land Use and Forestry which I
reviewed in a previous chapter.
In August, 1932, Governor Olson appointed a commit-
tee on land utilization which rendered its report in Febru-

ary, 1934, the editorial committee consisting of William

Anderson, Oscar B. Jesness and Raphael Zon. The findings
and recommendations of the Minnesota committee are

very similar to those of the Wisconsin group. Hence Gov-

ernor Olson's letter of acknowledgment affords an interest-
ing opportunity to compare his point of view with that of
Governor Phil La Follette.
Governor Olson's letter was written two years after Gov-
ernor La Follette had written his. The dilemma of Min-
nesota is more acute, if anything, than that of Wisconsin.
Here was Olson's opportunity to state dramatically the
veiled implications of the report and affirm the inevitable
conclusion, which is that intelligent land utilization is not
possible within the framework of private initiative and
198
 THE HOUR HAND AND "PLANNING" 199

ownership. But one finds nothing in Olson's cautious

phrases that approaches even the ^Esopian radicalism of
Governor La Follette, as expressed in the sentence already
quoted:
"We are learning that there can be no arbitrary separa-
tion between a responsible exercise of power and author-

ity by government officials in the narrow sense and by those

who are engaged in the great basic economic activities,
whose decisions and actions have a decisive influence upon
the life of the community."
A tentative conclusion from this evidence would be first,
that Minnesota is politically less advanced than Wisconsin,
and second that Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Governor is
either less acute or more cautious than the Progressive
Governor of Wisconsin. True, Governor Olson goes so far
as to say:

''Through larger public ownership and the development

of forests, water power, and similar primary resources, in
which the public interests cannot be entrusted to private
guardianship, and through social control over the other
necessities of life, the government must exert a more di-
rect influence in guiding the economic development of
the region."
But nowhere does Olson pose, as did Governor La Fol-
lette two years earlier, the hopeless contradiction of re-

sponsibility without power which every liberal or quasi-

radical public official must face.
Here, in a brief and hence rather crude summary, is
what the Committee on Land Utilization finds the state
of Minnesota is
up against:
i. The imminent extinction of the forestry industries
20O TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
of the state brought about by the wasteful mining of Min-
nesota's rich resources of virgin timber. "Four-fifths of
the lumber used by Minnesota wood-products industries
now comes from outside the state." Reforestation can only
be accomplished through state and Federal ownership and
management. "Private capital needs quick profits. To wait
sixty or eighty years or even forty or fifty is beyond the en-
durance of most private capitalists." Public expenditures
for reforestation must be made, even though the prospect
of direct return is small, because of the necessity of check-

mating the anarchic private enterprise of land colonizers,

and of withdrawing unproductive land from settlement.
The state "must protect public waters and game resources"
and can save itself large sums that would otherwise have
to be spent on state aid and in public relief for scattered
settlersand their schools and roads." In short, the dilemma
created by private initiative and ownership approaches the
scale of disaster from which the only escape is collectivism.
2. The approaching extinction of the state's second

major industry, mining. "The state must so plan its min-

ing industry as to perpetuate it as long as possible. This
suggests the necessity of continuous effort to discover new
bodies of ore and also of unremitting study of the prob-
lem of beneficiating low grade ores. ... It is generally
believed that the high grade ores cannot last much longer
than a generation more. The mines are becoming
. . .

mechanized and unless they should enjoy a tremendous

boom are not likely to need many new employees." These
quotations describe a similar dilemma and imply a similar
solution collectivism.
3. The spread of tax delinquency and consequent nar-
 THE HOUR HAND AND "PLANNING" 201

rowing of the tax base in the cutover counties where "the

total number of acres delinquent for one or more years is

probably close to 10,000,000." Urging the need for social

and economic planning to make these counties fiscally
self-sufficient and correct the present reversal of the normal
economic flow, the report says: "The conditions now pre-
vailing in the cutover region are such that to avoid further
suffering, discouragement and despair, the state must take
a hand in the situation." In other words, spend public
money to liquidate the intolerable economic and social

consequences of individualistic exploitation. The authors

of the report remark that "the American land policy of
the nineteenth century may be summed up in two phrases,
private ownership and immediate exploitation." In exe-
cuting this policy the government made a free gift to the
state of 8,486,000 acres and to the railroads, directly or

indirectly, of 11,114,000 acres. In the northern half of the

state much of this land, being now stripped of its forests,
burned over, and eroded, is tax delinquent and must soon
go back into the hands of the counties and the state. More
of it must be bought back from private owners to round
out the program of reforestation and flood and erosion
control.

4. Minnesota has exhibited the dubious beauties of

"subsistence farming" for many years in the cutover coun-
ties. Over half the farms are either
part-time enterprises
in which the owner is losing his former source of cash
income from forest industries, or produce little more than
what is needed for consumption on the farm. The report
warns that "if unemployed men are encouraged to go on
the land in large numbers they will inevitably come into
202 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT

competition with other farmers in an overworked in-

dustry."
5. Reforestation is necessary not merely to restore the
economic self-sufficiency of the cutover areas (only a very
low level of self-sufficiency is envisaged by the report) but
to control floods and erosion and raise the water level.
"Even before the current dry cycle measurements taken in
Illinois,Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota,
Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee and Wisconsin indicated that
the level of underground water had lowered some four-
teen feet in the eighty years following settlement an av-

erage lowering per decade of 1.73 feet."

6. The
population figures would seem to reflect signifi-
cantly the implications of the other economic and social
data. In the sixteen cutover counties the population is now
static or declining. "No one could have predicted that
from 1920 to 1930 there would be practically no increase."
Hence schools were established, roads built and debts con-
tracted which can no longer be sustained. The report esti-
mates that there was a loss by emigration of 1 10,000 people
during the decade preceding 1930. Moreover, "Minnesota's
population is aging rather rapidly distinctly more rapidly
than that of the country as a whole."

The drift of the analysis and of the recommendations is

allin the direction of a functional collectivism as the only

possible escape from the dilemmas created by individualist

exploitation of land, forest, and mineral resources. Failure
to adopt this course, the report implies, will lead to far
more critical conditions than those which the authors de-
scribe. But as in Wisconsin the detailed recommendations
 THE HOUR HAND AND "PLANNING" 203

zoning, purchase of land by state and Federal authorities,

changes in assessment and tax policies are obviously, even
ludicrously, inadequate to prevent the future crisis which
is For example, the report states that
clearly envisaged.
"there are in Minnesota some 21,900,000 acres of so-called
forest land for most of which there is little competitive
demand. . From these millions of acres of forest land
. .

we must select the acres best suited to forest management

and concentrate our efforts upon restoring their productiv-
ity. The rest of the land must be maintained at a mini-
mum of public expense until such time as the people of
the state can afford to place it under management."
The italics are mine. "Until such time!" There is no

pie in the sky of Minnesota's future under capitalism and

every intelligent person I met admitted it. Nor is there
any prospect that the state can buy its way out of bank-
ruptcy and muddle its way through by a program of grad-
ually developed state socialism, which is what Governor
Olson would seem to have in mind but for his oppor-
tunistic adherence to the Farmers Union line and other
strictly capitalistic economic whimsies. It is too late for
that. It would be too late even if Minnesota's dilemma
could be abstracted from the total dilemma of the na-
tional and international economy, which of course it can't
be. The report skates around this obstinate fact as best it
can. Except for a few painfully uncritical references to

Secretary Wallace's scarcity promotion program it makes

little attempt to place Minnesota in the time and space

context of the total national and international situation.

One of the report's saddest attempts at a kind of debili-
tated optimism is its reference to the "recreation indus-
204 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
tries" of northern Minnesota which are growing. Recrea-
tion is is a function of eco-
a function of leisure. Leisure
nomic security. Unemployment is not leisure. And what
the report envisages is more unemployment, that being the
only kind of capitalistic production which cannot be re-
by any program of
stricted scarcity. Does Minnesota expect
and "plan" for a future of industrial and agricultural
feudalism in which the upper bourgeoisie of the cities will

rehabilitate the ravaged public domain by doles in the

form of fishing licenses and guide fees?
I found macabre illusion to be quite general
this rather

throughout the country. Dude ranches are increasing

throughout the West, although their fees are lower. In the
Big Bend country of southwest Texas the impoverished
cattlemen and their wives were looking forward to the
completion of the projected International Park so that
they can stop raising beef for less than the cost of produc-
tion and begin selling hot dogs along the new highway.
The Terrible Swede, I reflected, would do well to rub
his nose into some of the basic realities chastely touched
upon in the report of his own appointed experts. Yet

again, it is necessary to give the Governor due credit for

appointing competent experts, as he did; acting upon the
implications of their findings is another matter certainly
not a matter for a politician to take lightly.

Struck by the omissions, inhibitions and contradictions

evident in this and other public documents of Governor
Olson's administration, I sought out a distinguished man
of science who has had a hand in the planning activities
 THE HOUR HAND AND "PLANNING** 205

stimulated by the President's Committee on National Re-

sources.
ThePresident, he opined, had been a bit brash in pro-
pounding the Big Idea of planning. He had cut himself a
mouthful which he would find much too big to chew,
politically speaking.
In the nature of the case, he thought, the officially ap-

pointed planners, in Minnesota as elsewhere, could do

little more than a descriptive job. This, however, would
be serviceable, since the mere ordering of the material
would establish the necessary direction for the social

process to take. Much was already known and intelligently

directed research would reveal the rest. It would be pos-
sible to fit the
jig-saw puzzle together, descriptively.
As to positive, planned action, the possibilities were very
limited within the existing social, economic and political
framework. It was clearly possible to control syphilis and
diphtheria. He wasn't sure of much else.
On the whole, we were, as a people, tragically ill-
equipped to meet the demands of the crisis. All our train-
ing has been specialist; whereas more and more synthesis
is
required. He considered the radical movement notably
had barely begun the task of
deficient in this respect. It

building up the necessary body of doctrine. In fact he

considered the categories of "radical" and "conservative"
to be rather inept. The true division lay between realists
and romantics. We had all too few realists. Our cultural
heritage was very thin in this respect, chiefly because of
the history and nature of American colonization.
The country was settled by dispossessed persons, adven-
turers and refugees from lost causes. They made a con-
2o6 TIME IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL FARM-BELT
scious effort to repudiate and forget the framework of the
society from which they had come. The new values which
they erected were pecuniary aggrandizement, a love of
skills, and a pioneer individualist self-sufficiency.
These values were largely antithetical to those which
must be developed if we are to deal with the present eco-
nomic dilemma. Fundamental to this dilemma, he thought,
is the newly emerged phenomenon of an approximately

static world population. If ever a man was crazy, it was

Malthus, who, he thought, came by his craziness naturally

his father was a follower of Rousseau. The second major
factor was the national self-sufficiency forced upon us by
the erection of foreign trade barriers. This factor was
aggravated by the current domination of fascist and other
nationalistic governments, but tended to be made per-
manent by the effect of the third major factor, which was
technology. The ease with which modern science devised
ersatzes substitutes tended to break down cost of produc-
tion differentials.
The general conception to which the consideration of
these factors had led him was that of "plastic planning."
We must be prepared to deal flexibly with a series of vari-
able or unknown quantities; the future development of
technology, particularly, was quite unpredictable.
Planning was a gambler's chance and you had to take it.

Although he admitted that as a planner, he was handed a

defective deck of cards only forty cards, not a full deck.
The metabolism of the economy was very low. Too low
for planned, gradualist resuscitation and reconstruction?
He wasn't sure. He had done the best he could with the
deck which had been handed to him.
 THE HOUR HAND AND "PLANNING" 207

Naturally, a few basic premises had to be agreed upon

before anyone could discuss the changes in the economy,
and in the distribution of population which planning in-
volved. Was Minnesota to be tied up with the national
economy or was it to be regional? What functional regions
could be envisaged? Was the ultimate objective to be col-
lectivist-Socialist or controlled capitalist? How was the

paradox of centralization and decentralization, both neces-

saryand coordinate, to be resolved?
For himself, he had arrived at few unqualified answers
to anything. He was a realist, not a romantic. Jovially, he
wished the radicals luck. They would need plenty of it, he
thought.
Like other philosophic sanctums, the planner's office had
only one door. And, like Omar, I came out by the same
door wherein I went. But I enjoyed the visit and on leav-

ing I reflected that again Olson had to be given credit;

he had given the planning job to one of the ablest men in
the state.
WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
 18
DROUGHT AND "PLANNING"

r ^HREE hours southwest of Minneapolis I found my-

J^ self inone of the primary drought areas of Minnesota.
For the next two weeks, in South and North Dakota and
northeastern Montana, I was never out of the drought
region. Rain was falling at intervals as the climate cycle
achieved its long-awaited wet turn.
To many today the drought may seem dated a thing
of the past. But the underlying problem the drought pre-
sented remains, has lost none of its relevance. In fact it
is crucial with respect to any program of planning.

I was a reporter, concentrated upon following the second

hand of politics and the minute hand of farmer and labor
protest and agitation. But it didn't take me long to realize
that I couldn't begin to think about any aspect of the
economic, and political situation of the drought
social,

regions until I had the answer to one very fundamental

question: Was there any measured and established peri-
odicity to the drought cycle had the meteorologists, the
climatologists, perfected any reliable method of long-time
climate prediction?
If the answer was yes, then planning was theoretically

possible, although only, it seemed to me, within the frame-

work of a socialized economy. But if the answer was no?
I reached the Pacific coast before anybody was able to
211
212 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
answer that question for me with any degree of assurance;
and the scientist who
spent couple of hours trying to en-
a
lighten me was none too comforting.
The answer, as usual, was yes and no. If there was any
periodicity to the drought cycle of the eastern slope of the
Rockies, it had not yet been established. Probably there
was no definite periodicity. The eleven-year and forty-five-
year cycles tentatively sketched by some of the scientists
who had been working on the problem were possibly sta-
tistical mirages.
So far, the answer was no. But the available records were
sufficiently accurate and extended over a long enough
span so that it was possible to estimate approximately the
long time climate hazards to which various portions of the
American continent were subject. On the basis of these
estimates it might be possible to plan or at least to plot

areas where non-irrigated agriculture might be considered

practicable and profitable and other areas where the haz-
ard was predictably too great to warrant the expenditure
of labor and capital.
You had to establish a norm, of course, before you could
write "marginal" and "submarginal" on your map in
terms of rainfall. You had to take into account what might
be done to restore the subsoil moisture by means of dams,
reforestation, erosion control, shelter belts, etc. And you
had to determine your frame of economic measurement-
was it to be regional, national, continental, or interna-
tional?
All this before any kind of political and administrative
effortcould be much more than emergency patchwork in
any scientific, long-time perspective. Should the eastern
 DROUGHT AND "PLANNING" 213

slope of the Rockies be evacuated? Elwood Mead, United

States Reclamation Commissioner, had incautiously per-
mitted himself this ominous speculation and had promptly
followed it up by areassuring correction. I understood
why when I talked to some of the farmers in the drought
areas.Even when much of their top-soil had blown all the
way toNew York they didn't want to leave. They refused
to believe that nature had deserted them, that the cards
of climate were stacked against them. They had grown

bumper crops in the past and would do so again. Just one

or two good years would put them back on their feet. This
was the best land in America.
Well, the farmers of Chippewa County, Minnesota, had
had a good year in 1932 when their black, fertile fields
produced a bumper crop. It almost ruined them, they told
me, because their corn was "taken away from them" at 12
cents a bushel and their oats at 7 cents a bushel. Obviously,
when the climatologists got through unscrewing the in-
scrutabilities of nature and estimating climate hazards, the

planners would still have the hazards of the market under

capitalism to deal with. And the current method adopted
by Secretary Wallace, of compounding the niggardliness
of nature by plowing under "surplus" crops, didn't seem
very bright, either to me or to the farmers, although they
had sourly plowed under their crops, taken their reduc-
tion allotments, and sold their starving cattle to the gov-
ernmentthere was nothing else for them to do.
The Chippewa County farmers were equally critical of
other aspects of the government's emergency program.
When I was there, they told me that in Chippewa, and in
four other neighboring counties, there was no seed, no
214 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
feed, and not enough roughage to last two months. But
the FERA, I was supposed to furnish relief
pointed out,
feed for their cattle. Yes, they answered, but only for the
subsistence quota of ten units which was all the govern-
ment allowed the farmer. A cow is a unit; a horse is a unit;
four pigs are a unit; a hundred chickens are a unit. Figure
that out for yourself and see how much live stock that gave
one of those southern Minnesota farmers who, on the av-
erage, cultivates about 160 acres of the richest soil in Amer-
ica.Furthermore, the monthly allowance for stock feed
was $25, but that allowance was apparently based on the
June prices of 35 to 40 cents a bushel for corn and 30 to 35
cents a bushel for oats. Corn delivered in that area was
then bringing 87 to 90 cents a bushel and oats 50 cents to
55 cents a bushel.
The result was that the farmers weren't able to feed
their cows enough keep them in production. Nor were
to

they able to feed their horses enough so that they could

be taken out of the barn to work out that relief, for stock
relief, like human relief, had to be worked out.
Most of the farmers had kept more than their "sub-
sistence quota" of live stock. They were obliged to, if they

expected to get a cream check, which was their only source

of cash income. They had to buy food for their families;
the hot winds that swept the prairies that summer had
burned the kitchen gardens as well as the grain and the
hay.
Yet the farmers struggled to keep their herds. When the
government was buying drought cattle they didn't sell as
many as they might have sold. They were in the dairy
business, and without cattle, how could they pay their
 DROUGHT AND "PLANNING" 215
debts and keep off relief? (About a quarter of the farmers
in Chippewa County were already on relief.) They weren't
"subsistence farmers" in fact they yelled bloody murder
when the phrase was uttered. Before the drought they had
made out passably well in the dairy business and they
hoped to get back into it. So they kept as many cows as

they dared, hoping against hope to be able to feed them.

In Chippewa County, about 25 per cent of the stock were
disposed of to the government or by private sale, the mort-
gage holder getting most of the proceeds: $14 on a $20 cow.
So that the farmer's chattel assets shrunk by about 25 per
cent while his debts, because of government feed loans and
other loans, were sharply increased. It was estimated that
the farmers in that particular drought area were insolvent
by about 30 per cent with respect to their chattel assets
alone. And as for the land, it was estimated that the aver-
age mortgage against the land equaled the value of the
land in the whole drought area. In Chippewa County, 75
per cent of the farmers were either tenants or had no
equity in the property which they occupied. Yet Chippewa
isnormally one of the most prosperous counties in south-
western Minnesota. . . .

It was about
this time that reassuring items began ap-

pearing in the Eastern papers to the effect that the conse-

quences of the drought had been greatly exaggerated. In a
general way, this may have been true, though I doubt it.
had tried to tell those farmers anything like that, they
If I

would have run me out of the county.

 19
RUGGED INDIVIDUALS, DROUGHT, AND DAMS

"T'M pretty tough, I am. I say every man ought to stand

JL on his own feet. I say, if a man didn't save in the

good years so he can get along now, then let that man
starve/'
This Hooverian sentiment was uttered, not by a banker,
but by an Aurora County farmer who sat opposite me in a
Plankinton, South Dakota, coffee-pot. He had just fin-
ished telling me that Aurora County had had just two
really good crops in fourteen years, and that his quarter
section of land was powdery-dry to a depth of fifteen feet
and over.

Carefully removing a load of South Dakota real estate

from my sleeve, so it wouldn't get in the coffee, I re-
marked mildly that if this rule were applied at the mo-
ment, it would have the effect of reducing the population
of the county by 50 per cent. He didn't believe it. They'd
get along somehow ifthey had to it would do those loafers

good todo a little work for a change. What work? The

farmers had sold their starving stock to the government.
Practically the only source of income was government-
financed relief work, and the majority of the farmers not
only had no savings left but were mortgaged beyond the
value of their land and chattels. Nevertheless, he per-
. . .

216
 RUGGED INDIVIDUALS, DROUGHT, AND DAMS 217

sisted,the government was doing too much was interfer-

ing too much with business.
I stepped out in the street and observed that, in fact,

business seemed to be going on much as usual. The stores

in this one-street village displayed the usual authentic

adaptations of styles in women's wearing apparel. The

strolling flappers, some of whom seemed to have more
than a trace of Indian blood in their veins, shrilled to
each other "Vas you dere, Sharlie?" and other Broadway
catch lines hot off the radio. Nobody was starving, so far
as I could learn, or even very apprehensive. Yet plenty of
people would certainly starve if the relief allotments
ceased. And there was excellent ground for future appre-
hension. For example, because there was no grain or for-
age, the farmershad sold their cattle to the government at
prices ranging from $8 to $20 a head normally a good
steer brings $60 to $100. Having sold their capital assets
what would they do next year, even if the hoped-for heavy
snows and rains came at last? Would the government sell
them back their cattle? At what price? And what about the
bewildering incubus of debt, both government and private,
under which these farmers were staggering? Would not
the suspended foreclosures be resumed the moment the
farmers got a crop?
Most of the farmers admitted these dilemmas. Yet I

was repeatedly warned not to write a word against the

fair name of South Dakota. Give them two successive years
of rain, they insisted, and this country would bounce back
into prosperity. The land was good, given rain. It was the
"best land in the world" and they intended to stick with
it.
218 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
From Sioux Falls to Chamberlain my route led through
the heart of the Northwest drought area. In a year of
bumper crops it must be magnificent indeed. When I saw
it, it looked much like the arid plateau land of the South-
west, except that instead of sand, sagebrush and cactus, the
fields lining the road were rich, powdery loam, stubbled
with stunted cornstalks. The few remaining
cattle were

permitted to roam which the hot

at will in the cornfields,
winds had destroyed. From Sioux Falls to Plankinton and
beyond the country was almost flat an undulant ocean of
burned and beggared fertility on which the white farm
houses and red silos floated like derelicts. The buildings
were good and most of the barnyards were well tended.
Clearly this was fat country once. If one doubted it one
had only to finger the black topsoil with which the wind
had filled the roadside ditches almost to the brim. One of
the principal relief jobs was to scrape up this loam and
dump it back on the fields. I saw this being done all the
way from Montevideo, Minn., to Vivian, S. D. And every-
where dotting the landscape I saw the stacks of tumble
weed almost the only crop that year which was being
given to the stock in lieu of anything else.

Here and there rain had fallen enough to make pools

by the roadside. But a few miles farther it would be dry.
At one filling station the proprietor pumped water from
a cistern and told me he had to buy it and haul it about
five miles. Most of the shallow wells were dry. Those still

flowing ran anywhere from three hundred to a thousand

feet deep.
Once this country was dotted with lakes. A few years
ago, Red Lake, near Chamberlain, went dry. The town
 RUGGED INDIVIDUALS, DROUGHT, AND DAMS 219

drilled artesian wells and filled it. But the artesian wells
stopped flowing and now Red Lake is dry again.
So narrow is the margin of moisture on which this coun-
try lives that one could almost say the relief load was an
index of the water level. Brule County, which borders the
bluffs of the Missouri River, had had almost no rain. The
relief director told me that almost half the population were
on relief and that the load was bound to increase. He had
been a banker and recalled the crash of 1920 and 1921
when all the banks in Chamberlain, the county seat, had
failed, because $100 steers were selling at $20. There was
one bank left in Chamberlain, with about $250,000 in
deposits, as compared with four times that in good years.
This country has good roads, built with state and Fed-
eral money. In Chamberlain I talked to an ancient Swed-
ish cattleman one of the pioneer settlers who cursed
these roads with fluency and unction. It was the roadside
ditches, more than anything else, he insisted, that had
drained this country. (He was less than half right; it was
chiefly the wells and the plowing up of the buffalo grass.)
The land, he said, should never have been sectioned off
for wheat raising anyway. It was not wheat country, but
cattlecountry the best cattle country in the world. The
grass was wonderful, and the alfalfa. In the good years
he had grown ten times as much alfalfa as he knew what
to do with. Now
he didn't have a spear on his place. The
roads had done it
please tell the Federal government not
to let the local politicians spend relief money on roads.
The shelter belt? Yes, maybe. But first, build dams. They
must bring the water level back. It was unthinkable to
abandon this country to "give it back to the Indians."
220 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
Once the old man had owned 3,200 acres. Like every-
body else, he said, he had speculated in the boom period
and got caught. It was true that speculative wheat farm-
ing during and immediately after the War had done much
both to ruin the farmers and indirectly to lower the water
level. In Sioux Falls they told me of a farmer who had a

well-developed 24O-acre farm and no debts. He came in

town one day and met a banker. The banker urged him
to buy an adjoining tract of 160 acres and undertook to
finance him. Within a year, according to the Anglican

priest who told me

the story, the farmer was occupying
the place merely as a tenant, until the banker could dis-

pose of the stock. The farmer had lost everything.

At the state capitol in Pierre I found that reliable

weather statisticsgo back only to 1893. Since then the
curve of rainfall, as sketched for me by the state engineer,
shows three major dips at approximately ten year intervals,
each drought valley being deeper than the last.
There appeared also to be some historical evidence war-
ranting the belief that in North and South Dakota, a larger
swing between wet and dry alternates over approximately
4O-year periods. There is Tepee Rock in Stump Lake,
which is near Devil's Lake in northern North Dakota,
which showed itself in 1855, again in 1894 and now is
again in view. And there is the testimony of Alexander
Henry, who came down from the north in 1806 and re-
ported that the lakes in the vicinity of Minot, N. D., were
shallow and alkaline their present condition. And on the
wet side, there was a time, in the homesteading days, when
 RUGGED INDIVIDUALS, DROUGHT, AND DAMS 221

big boats came all the way down the Red River to Wahpe-
ton.
In some parts of North Dakota the water level had
dropped as much as forty feet. In wide areas of formerly
productive wheat land there remained practically no sub-
soil moisture. That meant that the rainfall must not only
be much greater than it had been during the preceding
five years, it must be nicely distributed over the
but that
growing period of the crops. Otherwise, with a few weeks
of drought, the hot winds shrivel and flatten the grain for
which the ground holds no reserve of moisture.
The shallow wells had dried up in many areas; even
the artesian wells, because of excessive tapping, had ceased
to flow. Grain, which is comparatively deeply rooted,

transpires many times as much moisture as the buffalo

grass. Itwas agreed by all the experts I talked to in both
South and North Dakota, that much of the land, especially
west of the Missouri, should never have been plowed, and
the plans of the Federal government envisage turning
much of this land back to grazing.

From Pierre to Bismarck I drove north a few miles east

of the Missouri, following approximately the line of the

projected "Shelter Belt." I drove at sixty miles an hour

over good roads, but the country is so vast, so flat, so fea-
tureless, that I seemed to be rowing a clumsy boat across
a limitless ocean. At ten-mile intervals a town would lift
into sight: a water tank and three grain elevators, one gray
and two red. Ten miles farther, another town, a water
tank, and three grain elevators, one gray, two red. The
roads follow the section lines; almost every half section
222 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
has a small three- to five-room house, a large barn and
sometimes a shed or two. Most of the cattle seemed to be
gone and there were few horses; those that remained sel-
dom lifted their noses from the brown sod that was burned
and nibbled closer than any golf course. The weather was
mild, but there was little pasture. Never before in their
memory, the farmers told me, had they failed to have
enough feed and pasture to carry their stock through the
winter.
There were trees: about one to every square mile.
Doubtless the little boys of the region refer to it as "the

tree," and make ceremonial pilgrimages to climb it. Also

there were occasional house groves planted by the early
homesteaders.
So dry as it is, the foresters who planned the shelter
belt could prove that trees do grow in this region. They
had started preliminary work already at Bottineau, N. D.
They plan to set out cottonwoods, Chinese elms, and
Russian olive, making a close growth with a conical con-
tour that will best survive under conditions of extreme
drought and will provide the maximum of interruption
to thesweep of the winds.
Trees, the return of much of the semi-arid acreage to

grazing, and dams to raise the water levelthat was the

program projected by Federal and state authorities. But
only a bare beginning had been made. With CCC help,
North Dakota had built a total of 160 small dams within
two years. But that is only a drop in the big bucket of
conserved water that will be required to have any impor-
tant effect in bringing back the water level. One engineer
estimated that about 75,000 of these small dams would be
 RUGGED INDIVIDUALS, DROUGHT, AND DAMS 223

required. They could be built and the expense would not

be prohibitive, especially if they were built on contract;
he considered CCC labor, figured at $3.00 a day, to be
too expensive. A large scale program, approximately ade-
quate, would cost about $8,000,000 only a little more
than the annual appropriation for road building in the
state.

Thus far, in dealing with the drought-stricken Dakotas,

I have written as if theywere a-political; as if the second
hand of politics had stopped. It hadn't. In North Dakota,
especially,it was
gyrating at a furious rate when I was
there,and I shall now attempt to sketch some of the states-
men, in and out of office, who were trying to ride it.
 so
DROUGHT AND DEMAGOGY

the time reached Bismarck, N. D., I was prepared

I

BY to risk a tentative generalization based on my talks

with farmers, farm leaders, relief directors, and local poli-
ticians. It ran to this effect:
The drier this country gets, the dirtier its politics, just
as the withering lakes have become more alkaline.
It must be emphasized, however, that scummy politics

was a secondary, rather than a primary, consequence of

the drought. For two years North Dakota had sucked at
the paps of the New Deal. Most of the money in circula-
tion was relief money of one sort or another. And since
the administration of relief is an affair of
government,
most of the jobs were, directly or indirectly, political jobs.
In a single year North Dakota received nearly $35,000,-
ooo from the AAA: $24,000,000 in the wheat reduction
program, $8,000,000 for cattle, $2,000,000 on the corn-hog
program. In addition, the FERA expenditure for ten
months totaled about $13,000,000.
Even a political structure of unexampled integrity and
efficiency would tend to deliquesce because of the tempta-
tions incident to the administration of such huge, necessi-
tated doles.And as it happened, North Dakota and its
Non-Partisan League were in no condition to stand the
strain.

224
 DROUGHT AND DEMAGOGY 225
In 1933 North Dakota had drought, grasshoppers, and
Langerism. In 1934 the drought was worse so bad, the
farmers said, that the grasshoppers gave up and went else-
where. Grasshoppers can't eat politics. But Bill Langer
soared like a hawk over the stricken prairies, the eagles of
the national administration flew to the rescue, and the
ensuing battle was far from edifying.
Edifying or not it is worth some effort to extract the
essential meaning of what happened in North Dakota.
Similar battles are being fought, and still to be fought, in
many state capitals in America.
First, word about the North Dakota electorate, with
a
whom I had some chance to get acquainted en route to
Bismarck, the capital. They seemed admirable people on
the whole: hard-working Swedes, Norwegians,
simple,
German-Russians, and early pioneer Americans, with the
strain of plowing in their shoulders and the weather in
their faces. When I was there, they were staying on their
farms to conserve gasoline except when they were on work
relief, asmost of them were. The news came to them via
their country weeklies and the radio. They discussed the
news, shook their heads, and frequently came to the most
fantastic conclusions. They seemed easy prey for dema-

gogues. The sources of economic and political power were

obscure to them. They thought of "right" and "justice."
It was right and just that they should get "cost of
produc-
tion" for their crops. It was right that the government
should come to their aid when they were desperate. Who
was the government? Was Bill Langer the government?
He was an eloquent, passionate speaker. He said he was
their friend. The warmth of his handshake was contagious.
226 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
He could spend ten minutes in a little town and in that
time shake everybody by the hand. It was a strange world,
and the sources of power were mysterious. A. C. Townley
was to save them in 1918. But where was Townley? In
Minnesota, helping the Stalwarts to fight Olson. Who,
then, was the Non-Partisan League? Who was honest and
who was crooked, the Langerites or the "Rumpeteers'7

With this participating audience of groundlings in

mind, we are ready to introduce William Langer, star per-
former in North Dakota's tragi-comedy of drought and
demagogy. He is, or was, a lawyer, with a $4o,ooo-a-year
practice extending all over the state; also owner of 20,000
acres of wheat land. In 1918 he was elected Attorney Gen-
eral on the Non-Partisan League ticket. But a few years
later he published a history of the Non-Partisan League in
which he bitterly attacked the League policies and his
associates of the earlier period, and ran unsuccessfully for

governor on the ticket of the Independent Voters Associa-

tion. In 1932 he was back in the graces of the League and
was elected Governor by a tremendous majority in a land-
slide that carried with it complete control of both branches
of the legislature and practically all the important state
offices.

Langer's inauguration was delayed while he lay seriously

ill in the hospital at Bismarck. He recovered and public

sympathy flowed to him. He demanded and got extraordi-

nary veto powers from the legislature and by using this
power staffed the major state departments with his per-
sonal henchmen. To meet the attacks of the opposition

press, he launched The Leader and financed it by a 5 per

 DROUGHT AND DEMAGOGY 227
cent levy on the salaries of state employees. The paper be-
came his personal organ. When the FERA got going in
North Dakota the relief checks went out labeled "William
Langer Relief Fund" until Washington stopped him. He
declared an embargo on the exportation of wheat from
North Dakota which three months later was declared un-
constitutional. Meanwhile, according to testimony later
developed at the trial, Langer was speculating in wheat
futures. After vetoing a mortgage moratorium law passed

by the legislature, Governor Langer declared a mora-

torium by proclamation. But his political enemies charged
that this moratorium was relaxed or tightened to suit the

personal advantage of the Governor and his political

machine.
Meanwhile the Non-Partisan League was split between
the Langerites and the faction led by Thoreson and Lieu-
tenant-Governor Olson, and the New Deal was very much
involved in the squabble. FERA investigators came to Bis-
marck early in 1934 and soon Langer faced an indictment
charging him with coercing FERA employees into paying
that 5 per cent Leader assessment, the amount involved,
however, being only $184. About this time, Senator Nye
denounced Langer on the floor of the Senate. He was tried
and convicted, but ten days later swept the primaries of
the Non-Partisan League, obtaining a vote bigger than
that given to the candidates of all other parties combined.

Langer was tried, convicted, and sentenced to eighteen

months in the penitentiary, but a year later the conviction
was reversed on appeal by the Federal District Court.
Meanwhile the State Supreme Court ruled that his con-
viction automatically removed Langer from office. After
228 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
a moment of tension, while Federal troops from Fort Lin-
coln occupied the capital, Lieutenant Governor Olson
seated himself and proceeded as rapidly as possible to
break up the Langer machine.
In the campaign of 1934 the "Rumpeteers" of the
League held a separate convention and nominated Thore-
son for Governor. The Langerites, under pressure from
Langer, rather unwillingly nominated Mrs. Langer. The
Democrats nominated Tom
Moodie and the pressure of
the NewDeal handouts was brought to bear to force his
election farmers got their corn-hog checks just before
election with mimeographed pleas to register their politi-
cal gratitude at the polls. To combat this, Langer's High-
way Commissioner bought a fleet of new cars and the
Langer henchmen burned up the roads bringing in the
vote. Langer, if he had been able to run, or almost any
other male nominated by the Langerites, probably would
have won. As it was, Mrs. Langer lost by a narrow margin
I talked to German and Scandinavian farmers all over

the statewho said simply: "I vouldn't vote for a vooman."

It was pure power politics, patronage politics, staged in
a country pauperized and made desperate by debts, grass-
hoppers and drought. What happened was that in North
Dakota the New Deal had something like a budding Huey
Long on its hands, and got his scalp just in time. There
was perhaps some qualitative difference between the dema-
gogy of Langer and the demagogy of Jim Farley's local
satraps, but the similarity of methods was impressively
close. Principles? Programs? North Dakota has had rain
since then, and perhaps such frail and lovely growths will
have a better chance now.
 DROUGHT AND DEMAGOGY 229

Much significant detail has necessarily been omitted

from the foregoing sketch. I complete it with brief por-
traits of three of the star actors in the drama.

Langer was president of his class and valedictorian

Bill
when he graduated from Columbia University some thirty
years ago. His classmates noted opposite his picture in the
class annual that he was the "noisiest student, the most

popular, the biggest politician," thereby executing a rough

blueprint for his subsequent career. Langer is a big, pow-
erfully built man in his early fifties. The head is small,
the features hawklike and molded by the lines of illness-
he suffers from diabetes. He has extraordinary emotional
force and
projects all of it. His role when I interviewed
him was that of a tribune of the people, bludgeoned into

obscurity by the slanders of the minions of the corrupt

vested interests whom he had attacked. If the conviction
is reversed, I asked, would he try to come back, to run for
Governor or United States Senator in 1936? "What's the
use?" he shrugged. It was the gesture of the wounded

gladiator, and I was moved. Demagogue or not, Langer is

a great histrion with the faculty of believing enormously
in himself and in any r61e he assumes. This is the type,
I reflected, to which power will gravitate more and more
in this declining phase of our democracy.

North Dakota has a new, expensive state capitol build-

ing much resembling that in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and
even more beautiful. In the Governor's office sat Acting-
Governor Ole Olson, mildly pleased with himself because
230 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
of the commendations he received for his handling of the
Langer affair, but was hard
also mildly uncomfortable. It
for him to act like a governor, hard for him to act like

anything except what he was: a short, stubby, respectable,

kindly Norwegian farmer. His hands were much more
used to gripping a pitchfork than to signing state papers.
He fussed over his mail, not trying to seem important, but
because Langer a lot of tangled affairs to straighten
left

out, and Ole was trying to be conscientious about it, just

as he was conscientious about his barnyard.
WhenOle visited back in Eddy County, where he home-
steaded in 1895, the local weekly made quite a fuss about
him. Ole showed me the clippings. I asked about Langer
and he sputtered: "Traitor, crook." He didn't understand
Langer; he thought him a little mad. He preferred to talk
about farming, about the drought.
"In Eddy County for the first time we don't take out
the binder. We
mow our crop what we have." And the
farmers were losing their farms 75 per cent were now
renters. "I don't tink the Lord Almighty ever intend so
much land be owned by one man, by corporation."
I suggested that nationalization of the land with lease-
title based on use would be better and he glowed. Yes,
that would be better. We must change things, but we
must be civilized and do it by orderly process.
Ole showed me a framed picture of his father when the
latter took his oath of citizenship. Evidently it meant a

good deal to him. I did not think it fair to question him

too closely about the uses of citizenship in the present
state of our democracy.
 DROUGHT AND DEMAGOGY 231

Who broke the power of Bill Langer? I, insisted Sam

Clark, founder and editor of Jim Jam Jems and journal-
istic nemesis of North Dakota's ex-Governor.

"Up to the time that he was indicted and brought to

trial," declaimed editor Clark, "we shot writhen bolts of
the fire of truth into Langerism." The bolts, which con-
tinued to descend during and after the campaign, con-
sisted of large quantities of Sam's pioneer rhetoric, plus
canceled checks and other documents designed to convince
the voters of Langer's political and professional iniquity.
I interviewed Mr. Clark and found him to be a tweedy,

flowing-tied personality, a sort of Western Walter Win-

chell. He had made money out of Jim Jam Jems, a

melange of sex and political scandal stuff, and lost it in a

gold mine in Culver City. Returning to his home state of
North Dakota, where he was once associated in newspaper
work with Tom Moodie, he was at first talked of as a pos-
sible editor for Langer's paper. Sam thought better of that
however, and choosing the side of the angels, edited first
the State Record and then a monthly pamphlet-sized maga-
zine called Red Ink. Sam assured me that he had been of
material assistance to the New Deal emissaries in pinning
something on Langer, and I believed him. Later, when I
was in Louisiana, I wondered why the administration
hadn't sent him into the Kingdom of the Kingfish along
with the income tax inspectors. He is, of course, a strictly

disinterested patriot and among other talents has a golden

radio voice. One evening while I was in Bismarck I heard
him deliver a broadcast on the Nobility of Motherhood
that must have rolled the farmers' wives out of their rock-
ing chairs all the way from Minot to Grand Forks.
 21
THE EXILES OF FORT PECK

Williston, N. D., home town of North Dakota's

FROMnewspaperman-Governor, the highway runs north of
the Missouri River through semi-arid region of flowing
slopes arroyos: cattle and sheep country
and shallow
mostly, although in favored areas a good deal of wheat
was produced in the wet years.
The bad days of the frontier were a comparatively
bold,
recent memory in the minds of even middle-aged people.
I heard gorgeous tales that made me wish the writers of
"westerns" had stuck closer to their source material. One
of them, with which a coffee-pot acquaintance regaled me,
ended this way:
"I heard three shots and started a-running toward the
saloon. There was that little pimp folded up over

the bar rail with his head in the spittoon. I turned him
over but I couldn't see nothing and I asks, 'Did you see
the diamond on Wilbur?'
"
'No,' says the barkeep. 'The chief of police got there
"
first.'

Another variant of the Frankie and Johnnie saga, I re-

flected, and wished that I could have stayed to gather
further data. But I was headed for Fort Peck, Montana,
where the army was building the biggest earth dam in
the world across the Missouri River. I had heard much
232
 THE EXILES OF FORT PECK 233

about the model town of Fort Peck, which the President

had visited in the spring of 1934, and was prepared to see
an example of planning on the grand scale.

From Glasgow the army had built a good oiled road

running about twenty miles south into the desert and
ending on the bluff above the dam site, which was located
at a big bend of the Missouri, in a country of uncompro-

mising bleakness and aridity. There the army, urged on by

the need of giving some sort of employment to the drought-
stricken cattlemen and sheep herders of eastern Montana,
had, in than a year, improvised a work camp for a
less

project which at its peak employed over 7,000 people. On

one side of the central plaza were the pink concrete ad-
ministration buildings designed to house the permanent
administrative staff. The long sides of the rectangle were

occupied by dormitories for the women employees and a

temporary hotel for both men and women; at the further
end a store, garage, motion picture theater, and recrea-
tion center completed the picture of what appeared to be
a well-conceived and well-administered model town.
I visited the store and continued to get good
impres-
sions,although I wondered why it wasn't a cooperative.
But the prices of the goods offered by the concessionaire
were no higher than in Glasgow, twenty miles away on
the main line of the highway and the railroad. The bar-
racks were better than those of the average construction

camp. Water and sewage arrangements were admirable.

The army officer I interviewed in the absence of Major
Larkin, the District Engineer, was courteous and informa-
tive. I talked to some of the civilian engineers in charge
234 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
of various units of the huge construction job and there
was impressive evidence that the technical engineering
difficulties were being attacked and mastered with better
than average drive and efficiency. . . .

It was not until I wandered outside the gates of the

army's Spotless Town and talked to some of the workers

employed on the project that I began to have doubts. Even
later, when became apparent that one of the most im-
it

portant aspects of the job had been badly muffed, I was

in no haste to blame the army. Army officers execute
orders. If Fort Peck has been pretty much of a headache,
the departments at Washington were responsible, who gave
the orders.
There was trouble at Fort Peck; it was clear there was
bound to be more trouble. Trouble was implicit in the
hopeless contradictions of the "planned" setup. But such
was the inertia of "planning" under the New Deal that
nothing was done, nothing was changed, until in June,
1935, the Fort Peck Project News printed the following
editorial blast:

The New Deal as exemplified on the Fort Peck project is a

ghastly joke. There has been this result. Every sanctity of
human rights has been violated by the army and its greedy
partner. By their "soviet" decree citizens are told where they
must sleep, where they must eat. Families have been torn
apart and the people's spirit has been undermined. The coun-
tryside has become a paradise for the honky-tonk, the pros-
titute and kindred vice mongers. . . .

The New Deal performance on the Fort Peck project has

failed to live up to the Roosevelt promises. It is serving only
to help those at the top and to push down those clinging pre-
 THE EXILES OF FORT PECK 235

cariously to the bottom rung of the ladder up which the

people were to climb.

What? Was it the model community of Fort Peck of

which the editor was speaking? The Spotless Town you
saw in the rotogravure sections as proof that the President's
great dream of planning was being fulfilled?
Yes, and the town was really spotless, much as described.
The only trouble was that the workers couldn't afford to
live in it, couldn't afford to even if they were single, which

three-quarters of them were not, couldn't afford to even if

Spotless Town provided adequate accommodations for
families, which it did not. Where hundreds of them were

living, where they were obliged to live if they were to live

with and support their families, was not the Spotless Town
of the Fort Peck reservation, but New Deal, Square Deal,
Wheeler, Midway, Parkdale (there wasn't any park), Lake-
side (there wasn't any lake) a sprawling, pathetic slum-in-
the-desert, which you never saw in the rotogravure sections,
and the which has been rarely seen in America.
like of
The army didn't want them to live there. Quite prop-
erly, it viewed these shack towns with distaste and alarm.
They were without sewage facilities, and water came
chiefly from shallow wells. The hazards of fire and epi-
demic were serious. So the army issued a ruling that 80
per cent of the 5,000 men then employed on the project
must live in Spotless Town.
Immediately, the workers protested. Live in Spotless
Town? At what price? A common
laborer worked a forty-
hour week at an hour. But he didn't work every
50 cents
day, so that when he was obliged to pay a minimum of
236 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
$8.40 a week for board and lodging in the barracks, about
half of his earnings were spent for his personal subsistence.
What happened to his wife and children? They had to go
on relief.

The protest of the workers, voiced at mass meetings

and in petitions to Senator Wheeler, won action and after
the Senator had called upon Secretary Bern the latter with-
drew the barracks order. The workers stayed in their
shacks, which was no solution whatever for the problem
not even a "plan."
Until, as a grim but logical sequel of the whole per-
formance, scores of these shacks were washed away in a
cloudburst that flooded the flats of the Missouri River.
Nature evacuated the shack towns and the workers and
their families were obliged to seek temporary refuge in

Spotless Town on the bluff above and untouched by the

storm.

Clearly, none of would have happened if cheap but

this

sanitary housing for families had been provided in the

first place. The were
requirements apparent from the be-
ginning. Three-quarters of the workmen on the project
were married men with dependents. They had to be in
order to get jobs the Montana law established this prefer-
ence in order to accomplish a maximum reduction of the
But figures showed that the army had provided
relief load.
accommodations for 3,456 single men in bunk houses and
temporary and permanent residences for only 300 families.
And the prices charged for these accommodations were
quite out of line with the household budgeting of workers
as recommended by government authorities. Even the
civil service employees could scarcely afford to live there.
 THE EXILES OF FORT PECK 237

I talked to one of them who paid $35 a month for a five-

room bungalow, plus fixed charges for water, gas, elec-
tricity, garbage removal and garage service, which brought
the monthly total up to nearly $50.
The army had its official explanation of these contradic-
tions. Traditionally, a construction camp in the wilder-
ness a job for single men and men who are prepared to
is

abandon their families during the period of employment.

Didn't the army post warnings in railroad stations that
there were no adequate accommodations for families on
the reservation? It did, and the families came anyhow.
They built their shacks and the army, for well over a year,
failed to compete them out of existence, as it could readily
have done.
There was also an explanation. The cost of housing in
Spotless Town had to be amortized over a period of four
years the estimated time needed to complete the job. By
whom? By the workerswho were asked to use and pay for
that housing. But why in four years and why by the work-
ers? Whywasn't adequate housing, at rates proportioned
to the wages paid, a proper first charge on the total over-
head of the job? I obtained no satisfactory answers to

these questions. In effect, of course, the high charges were

the government's method of chiseling the PWA
wage scale,
which the contractors were also chiseling at every oppor-
tunity.

Except for Wheeler and Lakeside, which are sprawled

along the highway leading to the reservation, the ugly dis-
temper of the shack towns was tucked away out of sight
of casual visitors, mostly on the flat land below the dam
238 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
site.There were about a dozen of these towns, ranging in
population from 50 to 1,200, with an approximate census
in the Fort Peck area of around 10,000. About half the
houses were one room shacks built of composition board
and barn siding; some of these pioneers lived in automo-
bile trailers and tents; one of them had dug and timbered
a hole in the hillside. There was no sewage; every now
and then the County health officer, reenforced by a sani-
tarian paid by FERA money, came around and condemned
some of the outhouses; also some of the shallow wells,
which were the chief source of water. In Wheeler, water
was being peddled at fifty cents a barrel.
The county was without funds, but the health officer
besought aid from the state, which being also broke, be-
sought aid from the FERA. Eventually enough money was
obtained to pay the salary of the sanitarian already men-
tioned. But neither the state, nor the county, nor the army
had managed to achieve the obviously necessary preventive
measure of inoculating the children of New Deal, Square
Deal, Wheeler, etc., for typhoid. The county health officer
had done his best. He had obtained inoculations at cost
from the state health department and offered three shots
at 25 cents a shot to the parents of the mushroom towns.
But there were few takers most of the workers on the job
came there debt-ridden. The school population of Park
Grove numbered 387, but only a negligible percentage of
these children had been inoculated.

Spotless Town had a clinic, seemingly well-administered.

The larger mushroom towns had attracted a few doctors,
osteopaths and painless dentists. The doctor in Wheeler
 THE EXILES OF FORT PECK 239

told me that the week before he had been hurriedly sum-

moned midnight to one of those eight-by-twelve paper-
at
board shacks. It was occupied by a man, his wife, and two
children, one four years old and the other two. The chil-
dren were sleeping on a shelf. The woman was in labor.
Not wishing to make a delivery by the light of a pocket

flashlight, the doctor succeeded, after much difficulty, in

securing her admission to the hospital in Glasgow.
Does this seem a little excessive and un-American? I
was told of a shack, eight by sixteen, occupied by two
couples, one with four children and the other with two
babies: also by two single men as boarders. I myself saw
shacks where the congestion was only slightly less extraor-

dinary.
When the exiles of Fort Peck started naming things the
first name they considered for New Deal was Paradise
Valley. Everything is and from some points of
relative
view their shack town was a lot better than what they
offered them in Spotless Town on the bluff above. It was
at least human. It permitted them to keep their families

together. It permitted them barring the changes of fire,

flood, and epidemic to pay their bills, reduce a few of
their back debts, and recover a little of the self-respect of
which idleness, insecurity, and dependence upon relief had
robbed them. A cat skinner getting 75 cents a day told me
that by cutting the cottonwood of the river bottom for fuel
and other economies, he was able to keep his wife and two
children for ten dollars a week. That, he pointed out, was
better than spending almost as much for himself alone in
the barracks of Spotless Town.
240 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
New Deal was less than a year old, but already it had
achieved an accurate, if pathetic, parody of the American
civilization. Ithad a radio repair shop, a movie palace,
half a dozen small storesand restaurants, a real estate office,
an osteopath, a dentist, and a beauty shoppe. It had half
a dozen saloon dance halls and not all the taxi dancers
were prostitutes. Many of them, just as on Broadway, were
good engaged in supplementing the family income.
girls
In short, New Deal was where life was better. The army
had no authority there. Except for the tribute of land rent
to the rancher who happened to own the section of bot-
tom land below the dam site, the workers owned the town
and ran it. They could and did make loud and critical
references to the brass hats of the army. They could hold
their own meetings and discuss among other things the
bitter protest lodged by the Montana Federation of Labor
concerning conditions at Fort Peck.
President James D. Graham of the Federation has
charged that the investigation of Fort Peck by the Public
Works Board of Labor Review was a whitewash; that the
contractors on the job are constantly chiseling, and that
"trick" wage scales were inserted in the contracts approved
by the army, after the contracts were awarded.
It was charged at the hearing (and admitted by the

Labor Review Board) that these scales permitted the em-

ployment of semi-skilled and unskilled labor for skilled
"
workers' jobs at "helpers' wages considerably below the
level set in the contract for that type of work. This wage-

chiseling defrauded the workers of $50,000 in just one

week, according to an estimate presented by Graham. Pro-
test was also made against the "speedup" as applied to
 THE EXILES OF FORT PECK 241

truck drivers, forcing them to race all day at dangerous

and nerve-racking speeds.
In its report on the hearing, the Labor Review Board
admitted that the type of chiseling protested against had
been "brought to its attention from many different sec-
tions of the country." However, it declared its faith in the

army's ability and willingness to remedy this situation,

and closed with a of praise to the uniformed en-
hymn
gineers who, according to the Board, "had reason to be
proud of" their work.

The winters are cold in Siberia, where the Soviet gov-

ernment sends its political prisoners to work out their sen-
tences. The winter in northeastern Montana is also cold,

very cold. Some

years ago Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the
Arctic explorer, made a speech in one of those frozen
towns. He said it was warmer within the Arctic circle and
his It was a good, middle-class, patri-
audience hissed him.
otic not the exiles of Fort Peck, who are some-
audience
what more realistic. They know what the climate is like
in Fort Peck. They said that even the President, if he
made another speech there, would run the chance of hav-

ing his ears frosted.

 THE GHOST IN THE COULEE

a young ghost, and still, one imagines, very unhappy

is

IT and bewildered. Its name, if ghosts have names, is

William Rafts, farmer, aged twenty-nine, part owner of the
lonely 2oo-acre homestead, lost in the gaunt emptiness of
the Columbia River canyon, which comprised a part of the
Grand Coulee dam site. One Sunday night, the week be-

fore Christmas, 1933, Will Rafts waited until the family

had gone to bed; then he went out to the barn, fed the
cattle, and hung himself.
The Grand Coulee News chronicled this simple and
banal act in its issue of December
22, 1933; it also noted
that the government was starting the condemnation pro-
ceedings necessary to acquire the land needed for pre-
liminary work on the dam. The two items were intimately
connected. Will Rafts killed himself the day before he was
supposed to sign papers deeding the Rafts homestead to
the government for $2,100. There were ten heirs to the
estate. Some of them thought that Will should hold out
for more, but Will told friends it was no use fighting the

government. On the other hand, he quailed before the

anticipated strife with the other heirs. And finally, when
the homestead was sold, where would he go, what would
he do?
The next morning Will Rafts' mother went out to feed
242
 THE GHOST IN THE COULEE 243
the chickens and found the body hanging from the rafter.
With it there was a brief note: "Let this be a lesson to the
rest of my family."
She didn't know what he meant; neither did the govern-
ment representatives in charge of land purchase and con-
demnation in connection with the project. They knew
only that such things sometimes happen when big govern-
ment undertakings impinge upon the settled ways of liv-
ing of a primitive population; there had been a similar
episode in connection with the TVA
project.
Anyway, there was no time to bother. The engineers
were busy already; soon a spur of the Great Northern
would push through the rattlesnake-infested sagebrush
to the dam the Diesel-powered bulldozers would be
site;

chiseling roads along the face of the bluff; electric shovels

would pare away a million yards of earth and rubble,
down to the granite base on which the dam must be laid;
the canyon would rock with man-made thunder and blaze
at night with thousands of lights. Already, when Will Rafts
went out to execute his obscure vicarious sacrifice, the
boom town of Grand Coulee had spattered the cliff above
with a fungus growth of tents and shacks; other towns were
building Coulee Center, Electric City, Rim Rock while
sixteen and twenty miles away the towns of Coulee City,
Almira and Wilbur were enjoying the anticipatory pros-
perity of the boom.
Arrived at Grand Coulee, it was quickly apparent that
Will was not the only ghost who haunted the Coulee. It
was full of ghosts and some of them were very much alive:
the ghosts of vested interests and ownership in land and
water rights; the ghosts of "states' rights" and the rights of
244 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
minor political sub-divisions; the ghosts of two generations
of American pioneers who had spent laborious lives trying
with transient success to grow wheat and apples in the
Columbia Basin: the ghosts of land speculators and de-
velopers who had exploited the American dream of con-
quest and individual aggrandizement.
All these ghosts and others are instantly materialized the
moment the very idea of "planning" is broached, and no
wonder. Because the one thing these ghosts have in com-
mon is the American dream of Get-Rich-Quick and Some-
thing-for-Nothing, to which the whole conception of plan-
ning antithetical. In fact the job of the planners is the-
is

oretically and practically to exorcise these ghosts, wake the

people out of their long dream that life is going to be
better in terms of individual, unearned acquisition, and
substitute a new dream of collective planning and effort.
A social revolution would exorcise these ghosts, of course.
But the New Deal was no social revolution. It had been
forced to invoke the idea of planning because the old
dream was quite evidently obsolete; also it had to make
jobs. But it could not really plan; it had neither authority
nor power to plan.
Jobs had been made for about 2,500 workers on the dam
and a magnificent job of physical construction was well
under way. The largest public works project of the Roose-
velt administration, the low dam, now being built, will
cost $63,000,000; and it is to be so constructed as to make
it
possible to erect upon this foundation the projected
high dam which will cost $179,000,000. The high dam,
with 2,647,000 installed horsepower, will represent the
greatest power development known to be feasible in the
 THE GHOST IN THE COULEE 245

United States, will supply water for the Columbia

and
Basin irrigation project. The irrigation feature, which will
bring 1,200,000 acres of fertile arid land into production,
will cost an additional $214,000,000.
This, surely, is construction on the grand scale. More-
over, from the engineering point of view it appeared to be
entirely feasible; countless studies had been made of the
problem of supplying water to the Columbia Basin and
Grand Coulee was the generally agreed upon solution.
It was practicable to build the high dam, practicable to use

the power generated at the dam to pump water into the

great natural reservoir of the Coulee, practicable to pipe
this conserved water to the arid but fertile flat lands of the

Columbia Basin.
Under capitalism possible to plan and execute en-
it is

gineering solutions of almost any problem. The economic

solutions are another matter. With respect to the Grand
Coulee project, with every other "planning" enterprise
as
I encountered, any attempt to estimate costs and income
to measure economic practicability becomes quickly lost
in a sea of "ifs"and "buts," with the ghosts of the Amer-
ican Dream very much alive and gibbering.
The Columbia Basin Commission estimated that the
total investment required to complete the Columbia Basin
project, crediting revenues from power during construc-
tion, would be $260,000,000. Sales of power were expected
ultimately to pay the whole cost of the dam construction
and half the cost of the construction required for irriga-
tion, leaving the settlers on the
irrigated lands with annual
per acre carrying charges of only $5.39, in addition to the
cost of the land. According to the Spokane Chamber of
246 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
Commerce, land would be available to settlers at from
$5.00 to $15.00 an acre. But these estimates were condi-
tioned, first, upon the ability of the commercial market to
absorb the huge power increment; second, upon the will-
ingness and power of Federal and state governments to
control land prices by condemnation and otherwise; third,
by the state of the agricultural market during the fifty
years required to complete the irrigation of those 1,200,000
dry acres. The assumptions of population increase were
contradicted both by the current trend and the future esti-
mates of the recognized authorities. The assumed need of
more agricultural land was contradicted by the current
policy of the AAA, by the steady reduction of the percen-
tage of the population engaged in agricultural production
(90 per cent in 1790, 20 per cent in 1930) and by the im-
pact of agro-biology and agricultural engineering upon
the already ruinous structure of agricultural economics
under capitalism. In Harper's for August, 1935, Wayne
Parrish and Harold F. Clark in an article entitled "Chem-
istry Wrecks the Farm," state that "half our farm popula-
tion, by slightly increasing their efficiency of operation (an

extremely simple matter) could produce 100 per cent of

all agricultural products now entering trade. The
. . .

experts know that if

present knowledge of farm operation
were properly applied, the 1930 crops could be produced
by only 5 per cent of the population." One wonders what
level of man-hour agricultural productivity the army as-
sumes when it estimates that the project, when completed,
would increase the population of the Northwest by 1,403,-
ooo and the taxable values of land and electric utility
franchises by $217,484,300.
 THE GHOST IN THE COULEE 247

The assumed industrial expansion to be made possible

by cheap power from Grand Coulee is
equally speculative.
In general, western industry is limited by freight rates to
the western market; the experience of Tacoma and Seattle,
where municipal power plants have lowered the current
rates, has demonstrated this sufficiently. In a memorandum
to the Pacific Northwest Regional Planning Conference,
J. D. Ross, Superintendent of Seattle's City Light, pointed
out:

as cheaply at Tennessee Valley and it

Power can be gotten
is be assumed that the Federal government will dis-
scarcely to
criminate in rates between the Tennessee Valley, Boulder
Canyon, and Columbia rates for power.
Let us assume that it might do so to coax industries west-
ward in spite of the protest of the eastern manufacturer. Sup-

pose that large blocks of power would be actually sold cheaper

by one or even two mills. It is plain that that difference in
price must overcome all handicaps of freight, price of labor,
and of raw material.

In the same memorandum Ross concedes some validity

to the contention of the Grand Coulee boosters that the
electrolytic manufacture of magnesium from near-by
sources of limestone, dolomite, and magnesite, will provide
the basis for a considerable expansion of Washington's in-
land empire, even though a commercial process for the
manufacture of magnesium from these locally available
materials has not yet been perfected. Assuming that such a

process is worked out, the barrier of freight rates need not

be prohibitive since magnesium is
light and the market
for its alloys is likely to increase greatly when the price
248 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
is lowered. On the other hand, according to Jonathan Nor-
ton Leonard in Tools of Tomorrow, "Magnesium chloride
is a
by-product from Michigan brine, which yields a long
listof other valuable chemicals. If this chloride were not
used for magnesium production, it would have to be
thrown away." Furthermore, Mr. Leonard demonstrates
clearly that the procreativeness of modern metallurgy and
technology is such as to introduce an impossible number
of unknown quantities into any economic equation based
on present sources of and uses for almost any given raw
material. Under capitalism, metal competes with metal
and process with process, just as in the Northwest, region
competes with region and city with city; just as in the
larger arena of the national economy state competes with
state and one group of vested interests with another. In
this situation the New Deal's donations of cheap power
become merely bones to fight over and the still small voice
of "planning" is drowned in the clamor of competing
suitors for Federal favors.
The terms of this competition are the classic terms of
the American Dream: Get-Rich-Quick and Something-
for-Nothing, modified, however, by the stresses of a declin-
ing total economy so that the objective becomes not so
much expansion as a life and death struggle for survival in
which the competing regions, no less than the private in-
terests employ every available instrument of
affected,

publicity and pressure politics.

We even have the spectacle of competing planners: op-
posed schemes and programs for the reconciliation of the
various regional, state, municipal and private vested inter-
ests affected. The proposal of J. D. Ross for the purchase
 THE GHOST IN THE COULEE 249

by Seattle City Light of the properties of the Puget Sound

Light and Power Company and the re-sale of some of these
properties to other municipalities is one such scheme: an
important element of this proposal is the further develop-
ment of power from the Skagit. Against it are ranged the
proponents of a scheme by which the State of Washington
is to purchase the total bloc of Grand Coulee Power and

re-sell it to public and private distributing systems public

acquisition of these systems by condemnation being also

proposed. The literature of these conflicting proposals is

already so huge that it is impossible even to summarize it.

An important aspect of this regional conflict would appear

to lie in the alleged preferential advantage given to Port-
land over Seattle by the cheap power from the Bonneville
project now under way, and the improvement of water
transport on the Columbia up to the Dalles. It is appre-
hended by Seattle and hoped for by Portland that the
wheat, fruit, and ore of Washington's Inland Empire will
then go to market by water through Portland rather than
by rail across the Cascades to Seattle.
If the planners of capitalism have as tough a nut as that
to crack in just one corner of America it is rather sicken-

ing to imagine the headaches in Washington where the

embattled Senators and Congressmen, each harried by
groups of his constituency, bring their
fiercely antagonistic
mutually incompatible demands and programs to the
luncheon table of a President who hasn't yet made up his
mind about anything not even whether the power re-
sources of America are to be privately or publicly ex-
ploited.
In a magazine article I ventured to suggest that the trou-
250 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
ble with this picture is that capitalism can't plan and that
the dog-fight of regional, profit-motivated pressure groups
that passes for "planning" under the New Deal, merely

amplifies and accelerates the confusion and decline of the

system which Mr. Roosevelt was given a mandate to re-
store. I was instantly rewarded by being denounced, im-

partially and unqualifiedly, by all the various groups in-

volved, including both the reformers and the reactionaries.
However, the suggestion is here reiterated with all
proper
humility. Because of the rate of technological change, if

for no other reason, planning would be difficult enough

even given the centralized responsibility and power of a
socialized system. But to jam the new scale, the new pace
of the technological forces into the obsolete pattern of the
unviable but still vivid American Dream is a task that
must daunt the most stalwart and illusioned reformers.
Nevertheless, the attempt was made, and in fairness to
the embattled defenders of Grand Coulee I should permit
them to state their case. The following excerpts from a
letter from James O'Sullivan, Secretary of the Columbia
Basin Commission, will serve this purpose:

The Grand Coulee Project is the result of many years of

supreme sacrifice on the part of an earnest band of men and
women. During these years the deadly enemy of the project
has been the power trust. The project has also been opposed
by Eastern interests who do not want to see the West devel-
oped. It has met opposition also from the Ross forces in
Seattle and interests that want to see the lower river devel-

oped for navigation. . . .

You may rest assured that neither the Columbia Basin

Commission nor the Bureau of Reclamation is going to permit
 THE GHOST IN THE COULEE 251

speculators to take a profit on Columbia Basin lands. These

lands will either be bought by the Federal government at a
valuation of not to exceed $5.00 an acre on the average, or
the price will be so controlled that the honest-to-God farmer
and settler will get the land at a fair appraised value. It would
be suicidal to permit speculation to take the settler's profits.
The project would not be feasible. . . .

A representative of an Eastern insurance company recently

called at this office to secure advice as to whether or not his

company should sell to the AAA about 2,000 acres in the

Columbia Basin territory. The AAA offered them about $5.00
an company to accept the government offer,
acre. I advised his

telling the representative that the government would not de-

liver water to this land unless the owner agreed to sell all

acreage in access of a normal farm, say 80 acres, at an ap-

praised value to be set by the government. . . .

You and data published by

refer to speculators using folders
the Commission and the Spokane Chamber of Commerce.
The purpose not to encourage speculation
of these folders is

but to promote the project as a whole. The Spokane Chamber

of Commerce is a deadly enemy of speculation on the
project. . . .
You refer to the price charged by contractors for feeding
and housing in connection with the Grand Coulee project.
This price may be slightly high but no worker is required to
secure his food and lodging from the contractor. I believe the
main trouble is that the minimum for common labor is set
too low, viz., at 50 cents an hour.
have always believed that
I
common labor should receive at least $.60 an hour.
You refer again to the shack towns at the Grand Coulee
dam site, in order to prevent shack towns, it would have been

necessary for the government to have purchased an area at

least 50 miles square around the dam site. . . .
252 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
With all respect to Mr. O'Sullivan and other regional
patriots who have doubtless worked without personal

profit in behalf of Grand Coulee and

similar projects, it
strikes me that the above paragraphs merely document the

general contention that planning is not feasible within

the existing framework of law and ownership.
Paragraph i illustrates the several types of opposition
that any major Federal project encounters: the opposition
of vested private intereststhe power trust and competing
regional interests both near at hand and far away. Inci-
dentally, it should be observed that J. D. Ross, superin-
tendent of Seattle Light and Power, has repeatedly denied
any opposition to the Grand Coulee project as such. What
he has objected to is the prospect that the Seattle, Tacoma,
and Centralia municipal plants might have to "relinquish
all that they have gained through years of struggle and

amortization of millions of dollars of bonded indebted-

ness their plants in order that a market can be found
on
for Coulee power and in order that the Coulee and Bonne-
ville investments will be shifted to the taxpayers of the
state." His argument gains force because of the excellent
record of Seattle City Light, which in competition with
the Puget Sound Light and Power Company now fur-
nishes at low rates 75 per cent of the current supplied to
Seattle, and because of his success, after being denied PWA
money to complete the Skagit development, in securing

private capital for this purpose.

Paragraphs 2 and 3 ignore the reasonable ground for
expecting both speculation and government deficits fur-
nished by the record of Federal reclamation projects to
date. According to an article "Spare that Desert!" in the
 THE GHOST IN THE COULEE 253

June 16, 1934, issue of Collier's, land speculation in con-

nection with the El Paso project in South Texas forced
land prices up from 50 cents an acre to $50 an acre so that
speculators reaped practically all the benefits of the gov-
ernment expenditure, leaving the farmers to pay interest
on inflated land values and fail to pay the government to
which they still owe $13,000,000. On 28 reclamation proj-
ects, costing $140,787,000, about 11 per cent has thus far
been repaid. While accurate recent surveys are not avail-
able, it is probable that over half the land in the Columbia
Basin is owned not by farmers, but by insurance com-
panies, real estate companies, banks, public utilities, rail-
roads, and investment companies. Since many of them, like
the insurance company by Mr. O'Sullivan, are carry-
cited

ing on their books the debris of the American Dream in

the form of defunct wheat booms and apple booms, they
are not likely to take the government's $5.00 an acre for
their land if they can help themselves, and they are far
from helpless in the courts and elsewhere.
Concerning the folder published by the Spokane Cham-
ber of Commerce, referred to in paragraph 4, I consider
myself an expert in the matter of boost literature, and this
was a typical specimen. Speculators, both "honest" and
crooked, flourish in the lee of such promotion, and Grand
Coulee is no exception as will later appear.
When the President visited Grand Coulee in August,
1934, the Spokane Daily Chronicle published a special
Grand Coulee edition which was written from beginning
to end in the language of the American Dream. This
dream has nothing, and can have nothing, in common with
any genuine enterprise of functional planning. Among the
254 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
town of
advertisers in this special issue was the shack
Grand Coulee which the Columbia Basin Commission
doesn't like, but whose birth along with the other boom
towns would have been aborted if the project had been
really planned. They were inevitable at Grand Coulee,
just as they were inevitable at Fort Peck for the simple
reason that the government failed to house and feed the
workers decently at prices which they could afford; also
because the power of government is limited, particularly
the power of condemnation. Although all calculations of
economic feasibility were based on the completion of the
total project, including the high dam and the irrigation
reservoirand canals which would absorb a considerable
percentage of the power yield, only the low dam was at
authorized; later this was changed so that the con-
first

structionnow in progress is the first stage of the high dam.

But until the irrigation project is not merely projected
but authorized, government condemnation of the Colum-
bia Basin lands cannot proceed. Meanwhile, in anticipa-
tion of future government-subsidized prosperity, a lively
trade in the real estate affected was going on; the very floor
of the Grand Coulee itself was being bought and sold even

though it must later be covered with water. And on the

bluff above the dam saw the American Dream itself
site I

sprouting out of the sagebrush Grand Coulee, a boom

town built in less than a year out of faith, hope, barn sid-
ing and paperboard, crass and raw and startling against
an austere backdrop of leaning cliffs and sudden chasms.

Grand Coulee boasted a population of about 1,500 peo-

ple. It had twenty eating places, as many saloons, at least
 THE GHOST IN THE COULEE 255

a half dozen wide open brothels, five grocery stores, two

jewelry stores, a furniture store, two drug stores, two ladies'
wear shoppes, three beauty shoppes, a proportionate quota
of painless dentists, radio repair shops, and six real estate

agents.
The town was a foot deep in mud, and the ladies from
the sporting houses went in up to their ankles getting to
the beauty shoppes. But the 2,500 womanless males work-

ing on the dam provided good business, hence they were

cheerful and philosophic New
Pioneers. Also they
the
were closely supervised by a hard-boiled ex-army doctor,
who was much more interested in hygiene than in morals
he had much more trouble with transient hashers than
with the professionals in the houses.
The realtors were House lots and
also pretty cheerful.
business sites in Grand Coulee were being sold and re-sold
at a lively rate. One realtor told me that in a few weeks'
time a corner lot, 120 feet deep, changed hands six times
and the owner had refused $2,250. This for a micro-
final

scopic piece of desert gumbo which had sold at around a

dollar an acre three years before and which, there being
no logical reason to prevent it, will probably be reclaimed
by the sagebrush, the rattlesnakes, and the jackrabbits a
few years from now when the dam is
completed.
The realtors supplied me with specimens of their litera-
ture. It was standard boom stuff as the following excerpts
will indicate:

"Buy at the Fringe and WAIT" so said John Jacob Astor,

more than one hundred years ago.
"All wealth comes from the soil" Henry Ford.
256 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL

surely as the sun shines this great Columbia Basin

As
project will be completed and become one of the garden spots
of the world.
When the first unit is authorized values will soar and the
land within it now offered for as little as five dollars an acre
may be sold for $100 $200 $300 or even as much as $500
an acre.
A few dollars invested now and small monthly payments
will, believe, provide a comfortable self-supporting home
we
for your old age, or provide cash at some future time when

you need it. We

believe before you have even finished your

payments, the project may have been started.

Banks may break, stocks become
worthless, jobs be impos-
sible to secure but a few acres in the Columbia Basin pur-
chased now will always be a home and when the great dam
is finished a comfortable living for you and yours.

The
center spread of this beguiling document, copies of
which anyone interested may obtain from Columbia Basin
Land Owners, 204 Seattle Theatre Bldg., Seattle, Wash.,

reproduces an enlarged version of the war department's

map of the project and underneath are captions further
titillating the fancy of credulous investors and home-
seekers:

1,200,000 acres 30,000 farms capable of providing a living

for 100,000 people and producing food and necessities of life
for a million more room for cities and power for hundreds
of factories a magnificent dream ready for fulfillment.

A dream is The century-old American Dream of

right.
Get-Rich-Quick and Something-for-No thing. It was valid
in the days of John Jacob Astor the shrewder land specu-
lators of that and later periods laid the foundations of
 THE GHOST IN THE COULEE 257

many of the older American fortunes. That dream is not

valid today. It is a fakeand a fraud, and so long as the

Federal and state authorities permit unscrupulous pro-

moters to capitalize on it, their pretensions of control and
"planning" are subject to the same charge. This must be
said at the same time that the difficulties of control, given
the present structure of law and ownership, are fully ac-
knowledged. These difficulties are increased by the fact
that the Columbia Basin is strewn with the wreckage of
past land booms in which the Dream was exploited with
scarcely any pretense whatever of either intelligence or
scruple. A
part of this wreckage can, of course, be attrib-
uted to the fact that for the past twenty years the rainfall
in the Columbia Basin has declined year after year. An-
other part isattributable to the progressive squeezing of
all agricultural producers by the evolving forces of mo-
nopoly capitalism. But much of it was unquestionably due
and defla-
to the alternating cycles of speculative inflation
tion to which land values in the Columbia Basin have
been subjected.
During the first decade of the twentieth century much
of the better land in the Columbia Basin was occupied by

relatively prosperous wheat farmers and land prices were

high. One of the Grand Coulee realtors told me that in
1911 he had sold his homestead in the Basin at $50.00 an
acre. Recently he had bought it back at $1.25 an acre.
What happened, as he described it, was that as rainfall
declined and the prices of agricultural products fell, the
homesteader went broke and the bank or mortgage com-
pany foreclosed. The mortgage company tried to sell the
land, often failed to do so and consequently it too went
broke. The county then took over the land which had
258 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
become tax delinquent, and resold it, either to the original
owners or to a land development company.
Near Quincy I stopped at a filling station and the old-
timer who ran it was able to document this cycle out of
his personal experience. Quincy flats, he assured me, had
once been an agricultural paradise and would be again
when the long struggle for irrigation was consummated.
It was so fertile, so mild in climate, that he, a Scotch sea-

man, had fallen in love with the country thirty years be-
fore and for a time had been a prosperous wheat and
cattle rancher. Then had begun to decline;
the rainfall

ultimately he had been defeated by the combined forces

of nature, ever more niggardly with rain, and the erosion
of mortgage interest based on inflated land values.
In the twenties the wind began to blow the soil away
from the roots of the bunch grass. It was pitiful to see, he
said, and pitiful to hear the starved lowing of the cattle.
Once they had come down from the high country by them-
selves in great herds, for the winter pasture. I could see for

myselfhow little pasture there was now.

What I saw, looking east from Quincy, was the flat, dry
bed of the huge inland sea which the Columbia Basin had
once been. Once the gold of ripe wheat had flowed over
that desert like a tide. But the wheat farmers had departed,
their buildings had crumbled back into the sagebrush
and the blown soil had covered them. Now there was
scarcely a house or barn roof to interrupt the level plane
of the landscape.

Underneath this landscape lies another dream oil and

natural gas. South of the Basin, in the Rattlesnake Hills
 THE GHOST IN THE COULEE 259

district, there is already considerable production of natural

gas, and the Peoples Gas and Oil Company is drilling a
well in Frenchman Hills which is within the area of pro-

spective irrigation. I was informed that this company had

130,000 acres of land under lease for oil rights only, and
that these leases were being sold for $19.50 per acre for
the lease only. The language of the promotion literature
is again the language of the American Dream: "Give your

dollars a chance to bring you in a big profit!" "One suc-

cessful speculation a lifetime of work."
Itappeared that these leases were secured by the same
roving buyers, active ever since the authorization of the
project was imminent, who have been picking up aban-
doned or tax delinquent acreage. The rumors that ex-
Senator Dill, who was powerfully influential in securing
the authorization of the Grand Coulee project, was per-
sonally interested in Columbia Basin Land have been
vigorously denied by Mr. Dill and this denial must be
accepted, since there is no evidence of his personal inter-
est in such speculative activity. There was, however, evi-
dence that a number of the Senator's former political asso-
ciates were interested in the acquisition before condemna-
tion of Grand Coulee lands.
The Columbia Basin Commission does not deny the
existence of speculation in Columbia Basin lands but
minimizes its importance. But, Mr. O'Sullivan
protests,
"there not a single owner of any land in the Columbia
is

Basin who is not going to lose money through his invest-

ment. Both the private owners and the mortgage com-
panies have invested far more than they will ever get out
of the project. . . . The only advantage a speculator has
260 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
now is to sell his acreage at a price in excess of its actual
value to an innocent investor who is bound to lose."
Exactly. The fleecing of suckers in land booms is a peren-
nial racket, and each new boom is pyramided on the bones
of the victims of past booms. That, in the present instance,
some of the past victims are real estate and mortgage com-

panies is a circumstance calculated to wring tears from in-

vestors, but scarcely from farmers. If the Columbia Basin

Commission and the Federal authorities together manage

to keep the Grand Coulee and Columbia Basin projects
even relatively clean of speculation they will have estab-
lished an All- American record for projects of this size.

They may succeed. If they fail and the cards of law and
custom are badly stacked against them what will happen
is that a new frontier will be created, an artificially made,

publicly financed block of exploitable resources enabling

the Dream to be dreamed all over again.
In any case Grand Coulee, like other New Deal projects
motivated primarily by the necessity to make work, can-
not accurately be described as planning. It is regional pro-
motion and development, which would be admirable as
one unit of the Gos-plan of a continental cooperative
commonwealth. It is not that. The ghosts won't let it be
that.
What Americawill get out of the Grand Coulee project
isa big bloc of cheap power and a big bloc of irrigated
acreage excellent things in and of themselves, which will
be heartily welcomed and used by the genuine planners of
the future. Meanwhile they are likely merely to amplify
and accelerate the quite helpless chaos of capitalist plan-
lessness.
 23
SIGNS AND PORTENTS

chief business of the world at the moment is

THE that of avoiding another Great War. That business

was very much on my mind, because I had not believed
in the last war, and had not enjoyed my part in it. All
across the continent I had encountered certain signs and

portents that left me feeling decidedly uncomfortable.

Possibly I was over-sensitized, but I couldn't even look
at a power-damadmirable in itself without speculating
about itsuse in the perspective of an imperialist war. . . .

The army was spending $32,000,000 to dam the Colum-

bia forty miles up from Portland at Bonneville.
river
When the dam completed there will be 430,000 kilo-
is

watts for the private and public power distributors to fight

over, the probability being that Portland will purchase the
private company and achieve a highly desirable intertie
with the publicly owned plants of Tacoma and Seattle.

Meanwhile, the salmon-fishing interests were objecting

mildly to the destruction of the salmon industry of the
Columbia, threatened by both Bonneville and Grand
Coulee, as evidenced by the following excerpt from an
editorial in the December 15, 1934, issue of the Astorian

Budget:

The proposal of the regional planning conference ... to run

the Grand Coulee project into one of reclamation and irriga-
261
262 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
don, rather than a low dam power project, indicates another
threat to the much
attacked salmon industry. If the fish do
manage to pass above Bonneville on their way to the spawn-
ing grounds, Grand Coulee will surely shut them off from the
high reaches of the river, particularly if the high dam is con-
structed, for the difficulty and expense
of building adequate

fishways in connection with such a structure is almost insur-

mountable. ... In fact, with the power sources not needed
and land development apparently unwise, there is
apparently
no reason at all for Grand Coulee except to give someone a
job.

The answer of the Columbia Basin Commission to this

isthat few fish get above the private dam at Rock Island

anyway, and those that do can be dipped out and put in

other streams. The Commission also contended with rea-
son (in the end this contention was acceded to) that the
low dam didn't make would be no pump-
sense, since there

ing requirement to use the power and no irrigated agri-

cultural settlements to share the cost of the project as a
whole.
As far as I could make out, the army had organized the
Bonneville project better than either the Fort Peck or
Grand Coulee projects (the latter administered by the
Reclamation Bureau). Board and lodging at Bonneville
cost workers only a dollar a day, and partly for this reason
the chief reason being the proximity to Portland there
was comparatively little speculative building near the
dam site.

Both while in Portland and later I found myself pon-

dering the lavishness with which PWA money had been
 SIGNS AND PORTENTS 263

awarded to the Grand Coulee and Bonneville projects. A

war mobilization of men and materials would find plenty
of use for all that power; indeed, it would put the whole

productive apparatus of the west coast into high gear.

There was also the thoroughness with which the A. F. of
L. hierarchy sabotaged the strike of the northwest lumber
workers summer. The A. F. of L. bureaucracy was
last

patriotic in the last war, and would almost certainly be

patriotic in the next. If, as seemed probable, the west
coast would be the war base, then the A. F. of L. bureau-

cracy could be trusted to assist the fascisticization of west

coast labor. Something of the sort had happened in the last
war when the Loyal Lumber Legion was a factor in break-
ing the power of the I.W.W.
Seattle and Portland point north to Alaska and west to
the trade with the Orient. In the event of war with Japan
and the drift is increasingly toward such a catastrophic
consummation Seattle and Portland will be major bases
for military and naval operations, with the Aleutians, prob-

ably, a hopping off point for air raids on Tokio.

It is in this perspective, it seems to me, that the ka-
leidoscopic unfolding of events on the whole west coast
should be thought about, and I found informed workers
who agreed with this view. They too had seen the threat
written in the sky whenthe navy planes flew to Wake
Island; had pondered the meaning of the haste with which
the Matanuska Valley settlement in Alaska was rushed
through. Did the War Department want an independent
food supply base in Alaska in case the line of communi-
cation to Seattle should be broken?
Other developments are perhaps properly to be exam-
264 WHEN THE RAINS FAIL
ined in this perspective: the insistence of the State Depart-
ment and the President that the latter be given a free hand
in the control of munitions or other exports to belliger-
ents; that he must be permitted to define which nation is
the "aggressor" and so "keep us out of war" by commit-
ting us inevitably to the support of the power with which
trade is permitted. It seems strange, in the light of the
President's record, that anyone should believe that we
can have any real protection against being drawn into war
so long as the war-making power remains in his hands.
Not that the President really wants war Woodrow Wil-
son didn't want war. But it would seem that Mr. Roose-
velt, even more than Mr. Wilson, cannot be trusted to
resist the war drift.
Nobody I talked to in the northwest wanted war. The
business men, both liberals and conservatives, didn't want
war. But for that matter, the average American business
man didn't want the last war. He helped to elect a presi-
dent pledged to keep us out of war. This time busi-
ness will have better reasons than ever for not wanting
war; both in the northwest and elsewhere the shrewder
and more informed business men were aware that another
war would probably precipitate the ending of the present
social order. But these same business men, when it was

put to them, saw the same drift that I saw.

Labor doesn't want war. The unemployed don't want
war. Yet both unemployed and employed workers felt,
rather than saw, this drift. At the very bottom the half-
hungry hitch-hikers I picked up on the road, the casual ac-
quaintances I picked up in slum cafes and coffee pots
this feeling was most ominous. The last war was remem-
 SIGNS AND PORTENTS 265

bered, not for its toll of slaughtered and broken lives, but
for its spurt of employment, of war-prosperity. "I guess

things won't get much better until we have another war,"

they said. Did they want to be killed or maimed in an-
other war, I asked? No, but they would have to go.
They didn't say, simply, that they were half starved,
and if they were in the army and navy they would at least

be fed. But that, I was convinced, was what was in the

back of their minds. Mussolini, I reflected, after failing
to rehabilitate the Italian economy by public works and
the Fascist version of rural resettlement, had in despera-
tion beaten the drums for the conquest of Ethiopia and
in his mobilization of volunteers had given preference to
the unemployed. .Well, that is one way to dispose of
. .

a problem which continues to baffle the New Deal. Then,

indeed, it will be: "Unemployed, Back to the Land" to
quote the bitter phrase which the anti-fascist Italian novel-
ist Ignazio Silone proposed as a suitable
inscription to
carve on the tombstones of the next crop of war dead.
It seems probable that except for the professional itch
of the army and navy brass hats, and of professional patri-
oteers like Hearst, nobody really wants war, not even the
investment bankers. But that doesn't mean that we won't
have war. As to what war it will be, the War Department
in exercising responsibility for the "defense" of the
its

country preparing for war a particular war. In August,

is

1914, when the various war plans of Germany, France,

Russia, and England came out of cold storage, they didn't
have to be revised very much. The war that the brass hats
prepare for is almost certain to be the war that we shall
get.
CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE IS BETTER
 24
WHERE LIFE IS BETTER

mail in Portland contained an invitation to a

THE New
Year's party in San Francisco. If I hurried, I
could arrive in time, and I resolved to hurry. So the last
days of December found me coasting down the long
southern slope of the Siskiyous into the upper valley of
the Sacramento. For many hours I drove through rain,
fog, the drenched darkness of steep-walled, pine-wooded
canyons. Then, as I topped one of the lower foothills, the
sun broke through and poured gold into that whole mag-
nificent trough of the Great Valley, from the blue barrier
of the Coast Range on the west to the snow-covered peaks
of the Sierras on the east. California again.
"California, Where Life is Better."

Twelve years before I had written a booklet with that

Californians, Inc. I was an advertising copy writer
title for

then, and this was a hack job that oddly became to a de-
gree a labor of love before I got through with it. I had
come to California the year after the Armistice, still suf-
fering from the exasperating nervous depletion which the
physicians vaguely diagnosed as "shell-shock."
San Francisco had received me hospitably, even gener-
ously, and I was grateful. I fell in love with the climate,
with the landscape, and to a degree with the people and
their way of life. Besides working part time for advertising
269
270 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER

agencies I wrote poetry and participated in the indigenous

theatrical and other cultural enterprises. Here the Cali-
fornians seemed to me
to be lazy and sentimental. I jeered
at them
ruthlessly and somewhat pharisaically I wonder
now that they bore with me as tolerantly as they did. But
I wrote that booklet and then, after three years, I went

East, with the promise of reemployment if I chose to re-

turn.
In New York, I ran into John Cowper Powys, whose
Oxford-gowned platform histrionism I had had frequent
occasions to admire during his annual barn-storming tours
of the Pacific Coast.
"What! You are going back?" exclaimed Powys, his
craggy, Silurian countenance suddenly becoming a mask
of horror. "Ah, Rorty, don't go back to that terrible coun-
try! I speak as a prophet, Rorty. Don't go back!"
But with the words of that strange, unique man of

genius ringing in my ears, I did go back. I had, even then,

a suspicion that Powys was right. But California had done

much to restore my health. I loved the country with the
same sort of obstinate, defeated passion that the late Mary
Austin reveals in her "Lands of the Sun." And I liked the
people not just my friends, but the population of the
San Francisco Bay region at large. I had found them to
be decent, kindly, generous people. It was their state, and
it was beautiful past describing. Why did it have to be

terrible? Powys was a charlatan, I told myself he has in-

deed mocked himself with that charge and I could well
forget his Sibylline howl. So I went back to California
with my advertising banjo on my knee, and stayed an-
other year. . . .
 WHERE LIFE Is BETTER 271

Now, was back again. It was mid-

after ten years, I

winter, yet I lay on the ground in the orange orchard of

a friendly rancher, ate the ripe fruit, and fell once more
under the spell of the warm sunlight, the complex, be-
guiling fragrances, the wide sweep and lift of beauty all
around me.
"California, Where Life is Better" I still
possessed a
copy of that ancient opus and decided to have a look at
it. ... I should have known better. There was a job
for you! To be sure, I had rigorously insisted that the
facts in the booklet be true facts, and both the agency and

the client had supported me. They were true facts as far
as they went. Even the enthusiasm still sounded genuine.
But both the facts and the enthusiasm were beside the
point. I had not wanted to perpetrate a fake. Yet I had
faked it just the same. Certainly, what needed to be said
about California in 1922 was not what I had written in
that booklet. Indeed, I reflected that if I and others-

enough of them had said and done those necessary, in-

transigent things in 1922, perhaps I would not have now
found myself entering a valley still reeking with the stench
of violence, the misery of starved and terrorized workers;
would not be headed for a city still shaken by a general
strike and its red-hunting sequel.

No, I had not written the truth about California in

that booklet. Instead I had quoted the archaic genteel op-
timism of Bayard Taylor:

Driving along through these enchanting scenes I had a

grander dream. I saw a more beautiful race in possession of
this Paradise a race in which the best symmetry and grace
272 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
of the Greek are partially restored; milder manners, better

regulated impulses, and a keen appreciation of the arts which

enrich and embellish life.

After which, in the introduction, I had myself been

guilty of the following:

. . . California cannot fulfil her manifest potentialities

until many new millions have been added to her present
population. The hard-sledding pioneer phase is past. There
remains the task of building, in this garden of the West, a
proud and rich civilization which will be in some measure an
answer to the opulent challenge of nature. Life today in Cali-
fornia is on the whole freer, richer, happier in all
probability
than it
anywhere is else in the world. What life can be
to-

morrow, and the day after tomorrow, if man does well

his

part where nature has been infinitely prodigal, is something

that can scarcely be contemplated without a catch of the
breath.

Dream stuff. Californians have always been good at

covering the ugliness of the present fact with a saccharine
frosting of neo-Hellenic day-dreaming. It is the sentimen-
tality of the pioneer; the other face of that sentimentality
being a childish, hysterical brutality. "If man does well
his part" I should have expanded that "if" and written
what was true then and is still true: that not even the

ground-work of a civilization has been laid on the Pacific

Coast of America; that the dream of the pioneers was a
childish, greedy fake, doomed from the beginning to dis-
solve in panic-stricken chaos. . . .

Sutter had known this, when they found gold in his

mill race at Sacramento, and promptly proceeded to
 WHERE LIFE Is BETTER 273
drive him out of the primitive pastoral paradise he had
begun to create. Powys, I reflected, had known it too.

That was what he had meant when he thundered his Cas-

sandra-like prophecies and urged me not to go back.
I had been a Californiac, even though I didn't know it.

What is a Californiac? Is it something evil, as Powys had

seemed to imply? No, it is not exactly evil. It is something
stupid and ignorant, and cruel, subject to sudden panics
and rages. The vigilantes of the fifties were Californiacs.
They had suppressed the "bad men" and made San Fran-
cisco safe for the succession of financial and political high-
binders who had looted it assiduously and for the most
part legally right up to the earthquake and afterward.
And now I was soon to encounter the Californiacs of 1935
the San Francisco Industrial Association and the Asso-
ciated Farmers who were busy saving California again,
and for similar purposes.
Well, I was no longer a Californiac. The intervening
decade had done something to me and for me. This time
I would write a straight story to the best of my ability
and leave it as a human testimony for those unsubdued
Coast Range hills, so arid and hard under their soft con-
tours, to mock at.

At Williams I found some pretext to get rid of my

hitch-hiker of the moment. He was a backwoods Michi-
gan boy who had chauffeured a middle-aged couple across
the continent, and now tormented me with his frantic
longing to get to Los Angeles in time to see the Southern
California-Notre Dame football game. I liked him well

enough and sympathized mildly with his heart's desire.

274 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
But I wanted to be alone with that well-remembered land-
scapewanted to see whether it could still do to me what
it had done before.

It did. Isuppose there is no more insidiously beautiful

landscape in the world than the Great Valley, and even
more, the valleys in the folds of the Coast Range between
the Sacramento and the sea. It was these I remembered
and sought again, leaving the main highway and plunging
into the pass that would take me, first to Clear Lake, and
then down the western slope of Mt. Helena into the warm,
wine-scented luxuriance of the Napa Valley.
Quickly the pink-hued prune and apricot orchards were
succeeded by the green live-oaks. The road climbed,
twisted, descended. The scrawl of hills and valleys was so
intricate that at times I lost all sense of direction. Under
the live-oaks sheep were grazing, the young lambs drifting
after their mothers like little ragged pieces of detached
fluff. Whole
valleys seemed almost entirely unoccupied,
tranquil and soundless, except for the cropping sheep and
the seep of spring water out of the banks. Here, surely,
beauty and peace were to be had by the square mile, if
But I put that "if" out of my mind. The country, I told
myself again, was young, beautiful, and not terrible.
At the peak I caught a glimpse of the Pacific, breaking
at the foot of the westernmost range. Then I began coast-
ing down the long spiral into the Napa Valley, with the
vineyards climbing up the foothills to meet me; the fra-
grance, too, of a hundred wineries. Reverently, I entered
into one of those cool, moist-walled cloisters and bought
a gallon of excellent claret for a quarter of what it would
have cost me in New York.
 WHERE LIFE Is BETTER 275

But, as usual, I had to hurry. Skirting the base of Mt.

Tamalpais, I saw again the green, fog-nourished hills of

Marin County, with the bay on one side and the sea on
the other a whole world of beauty in itself. Sausalito was
almost unchanged only the piers of the new bridge rising
as a threat to the quiet of the redwood canyons and the
unspoiled beaches stretching for miles up the coast. . . .

San Francisco again. On an earlier New Year's Eve I

had written:

The prisoners of starvation came out

My people, Oh my beautiful people came out, twirling rattles
and blowing horns at the moon!

They came out that evening, many whom I remembered

and some new ones: the artists, the writers, the intellec-
tuals, the"more beautiful race" Bayard Taylor was
chastely mooning about when he wrote that blurb for my
boost pamphlet. As a matter of fact many of them were
beautiful, in body and in spirit. ... It was all very gay,
mildly drunken, and a little sad. Sad, because none of
these people could re-capture the freedom, the grace, the
old bohemian carelessness that had so charmed me ten

years before.
That grace,which was never wholly authentic, was
fading even then. It was gone now the general strike and
its
red-hunting sequel had slain it. I heard tales of the
persecution and espionage that some of my friends had
suffered. I heard other tales, even less pretty, of "liberal"

educators who, reading the storm warnings, had prudently

276 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
snuffed out their little candles well in advance of the gale
of terror that Hearst, Johnson, and Company had un-
leashed on the Bay Cities. Well-to-do liberals, torn by
sympathy for the cotton pickers of the San Joaquin or the
"stoop labor" of the Salinas Valley, had been talked to
firmly by their bankers. Some of them had talked back
staunchly. . Their circle of friends had narrowed.
. .

The were being drawn more and more sharply

lines
now. San Francisco labor was fighting for its life. San
Francisco bankers and industrialists felt that they were
fighting for their lives. The day of the liberals, the "me-
diators" of the culture, was past. The drive of a brutal,

acquisitive barbarism cannot be "mediated" any more

than a plague of locusts can be mediated. It can be de-
stroyed, perhaps, to make room for something better

though only after it has almost destroyed itself; and that

time was not yet.
With respect to the main business of life, which was
the grabbing and exploitation of mineral and oil resources,
of water and its yield of power and irrigation, of fruit land
and rice land and delta land for truck growing, of trans-

portation franchises and other opportunities for legal ban-

ditry, of successive waves of imported peon labor with
respect to California's primary acquisitive drive, the role
of the intellectuals, the "beautiful people," was, had always
been, irrelevant, adventitious and meagerly parasitic.
That was the reason they had been very imperfectly
beautiful and almost nothing they said or did had seeded
itself in the human and natural landscape. Now in age
many of them were sad; their hopes and dreams had
turned to bitterness and cynicism.
 WHERE LIFE Is BETTER 277
Fremont Older, a great newspaperman and in his day
a great reformer, was a beautiful person. But I remem-
bered him only in defeat. I remembered the emphatic
bang of his bald head on the wall back of his desk as he
told me the things that couldn't be done, all the mas-
all

sive reasons there were for consigning the human race to

a richly deserved perdition. Hearst had drawn the teeth
of one of California's boldest, bravest lions; I was told he
spent his declining years in sympathetic converse with the
Lord of San Simeon, whose cynical liberality ensured his
comfort.
George Sterling was at times almost a great poet and
always a beautiful person. The tycoons of the Bohemian
Club had drawn his teeth too, and patronized his produc-
tivity to death, although they had never been able to
destroy the instinctive artist's fidelity to his art, or his in-
vincible dignity and generosity of spirit. But I knew that
he had been glad to die.
The spinsterish Bayard Taylor would have been
shocked at the new archetypes of human beauty who were
coming forward to succeed the "beautiful people" of San
Francisco's bohemian past. Bridges, for example, the mili-
tant rank-and-file leader of the longshoremen. Physically,
that close-mouthed "hard rock from down under" ex-
hibited something of the "symmetry and grace of the
Greek." But his manners, though he was courteous
enough, were scarcely mild.
The seventeen communists then awaiting trial at Sacra-
mento for "criminal syndicalism" were even better ex-
amples of the new people. Both at first and second hand
I saw and learned enough about them to feel that their
278 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
version of human beauty was superior to almost anything
California had produced in the past. For the most part,
they represented the radicalized student cadres of the
Communist Party. They were young,
energetic, idealistic,
and they had needed these qualities to accomplish the
all

formidable task of organizing the Agricultural and Can-

nery Workers Union. It had been, indeed, an epic struggle,

successfully waged in strike after strike, until the whole

force of the food-producing corporations and their banker
allies was mobilized to smash the union and jail the lead-

ers. Before I left California I found myself twice drawn

into the sequel of that struggle.
What of the inheritors of San Francisco's liberal tra-
dition? How had they adapted themselves to the sharp-
ened terms of conflict, in this Gotterdammerung of San
Francisco's frail and aborted pseudo-Hellenism?
It seemed to me that they divided roughly into two cate-

gories: the liberals in business and the liberals in the arts

and in the professions. Most of the former, during the
general uproar of the strike, had been drawn into the
fight on the side of the employers kicking, squalling,
futilely "mediating," but nevertheless serving faithfully
after their fashion. To do them justice, some of them had
certainly done temper and abbreviate the
their best to

red-hunting sequel of the general strike. But theirs was

not a felicitous role, nor were they happy in it.
I talked to a member of the Chamber of Commerce
who described himself as an "evolutionary socialist."

Everything was for the best in the best of all possible

worlds, he assured me. I was wrong in thinking that San
Francisco was ruled by an organized plutocracy of finance
 WHERE LIFE Is BETTER 279
and industry. The picture was rather that of a congeries
of antipathetic groups, loosely united under the banner of
the Industrial Association during the general strike, but
already flying apart again for reasons of both profit and
opinion. He was more or less right, although the trend
was toward a closer integration of the forces of business
along fascist lines.
A newspaperman who had gone the way of all jour-
nalistic flesh into publicity was grimmer and less opti-
mistic. The situation was complicated, he explained, by
the fact that the majority of the business leaders hadn't
the slightest idea of what it was all about. They knew that
strikes were bad for business, and they felt that labor
should be "kept in its place." But they stalled like model
T Fords when faced with the multi-engined complexities
of the current economic and social situation.
The people who ran things, he explained, were the nat-
ural dominators who would run any setup, capitalist, fas-
cist, or communist, but these dominators rarely understood

anything, not even their own instinctive technique of

domination. Another type was the natural acquisitor it is
a gift, he assured me, like the ability to play the fiddle
who would tend to acquire place and privilege in any
setup. The acquisitor was likely to understand a little
if he was a
more, especially Jew the Jews were natural
analysts. But none of them understood enough. There
were perhaps half a dozen business men in the whole
city who had mastered the elementary facts of the capital-
ist economy and culture which were accepted as the com-

monplaces of our discussion; which any moderately com-

petent village socialist can recite by the yard.
280 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
seems incredible, one must remind himself that
If this

the odds were all against business men really learning

anything let alone doing anything about it when they
did learn something. The pressures and tensions of the
crisis all tended to narrow the focus of the business man's

vision to the ledgers of hisown business. The more he

needed to know about everything the less time he had to
study and reflect. Hence the current premium on "intel-
lectuals" in business: the more recentuniversity graduates,
also ex-professors and ex-journalists hired to think for
business.
What would that be? The dominators
sort of thinking
and the acquisitors between them would see to it that it
was fascist thinking as soon as the wet and shrinking shoe
of the capitalist decline pinched hard enough. In fact, it
was already evident that a good deal of precisely that sort
of thinking was being done, and its conclusions embodied
in action. The Associated Farmers, Inc., had been assigned
the job in the valleys, where already stockades were being
erected for the incarceration of workers in the inevitable
strikes to come, and correspondence courses in the tech-
nique of vigilantism were being conducted. In San Fran-
cisco, the Industrial Association was bound to stage a
comeback. They had yielded too much for their comfort
in the settlement of the longshoremen's strike, and the

competition of open-shop Los Angeles was a growing chal-

lenge and threat.
So much for the intellectuals in business. As for the
"beautiful people" in the arts and in the professions, they
again divided into two categories: the old-line liberals and
the new crop of depression converts, most of whom had
 WHERE LIFE Is BETTER 281

gone communist with a bang. At the New Year's party I

cornered one of the ablest and most informed of the for-
mer class. He said, in gloomy summation: "This is a son-
ofabitch period. The fascists are sonsabitches and the
communists are sonsabitches, and they'll have to fight it
out on their own level. It's no time for decent people,
liberal people who fuss about truth, tolerance, such things
as that. We're on the spot now and I guess we'll always
be on the spot."
I found that this expressed, with some
qualifications, the
mood of many of the Bay City liberals I encountered.
As for the new crop of depression-converted intellectual
radicals,pure scientists or pure artists yesterday and pure
communists today, they repudiated this liberal defeatism
with flaming conviction. Although not members of the
Party, they hewed to the Party line more strictly than
Earl Browder himself. This was natural, since Mr. Brow-
der is subject to the Higher Learning of the Comintern,
with itsdisconcerting shifts of permanent infallibility.
Most of them had little Marx and less Lenin. Some of
them had mastered a good deal of both, but had little
knowledge of, or experience with, the radical labor move-
ment, and practically no understanding of the factional
conflicts of revolutionary politics. Yet all of them swal-
lowed the new gospel with an uncritical unction equal to
that with which the eminent physicist, Robert Millikan,
swallows the Episcopalian God.
The day after I reached San Francisco, I became in-
volved, as a member of the Non-Partisan Labor Defense,
in an effort to build a united front defense of the Sacra-
mento prisoners. The Sacramento criminal syndicalism
282 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
trial arose out of industrial struggles of which the now-
extinct Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial
Union was the storm-center. The 1934 Leonard-French-
Lubin report to the National Labor Board has revealed
that many of the three to four hundred thousand migra-

tory farm workers of the Sacramento, San Joaquin and

Imperial valleys live under conditions which "words can-
not describe." The Federal investigators established that
"many workers are not able to earn sufficient to maintain
even a primitive, or savage standard of living."
When, in 1933, the union by a series of strikes in which
many pickets were wounded and killed, forced general
wage raises for field and shed labor, there began with the
connivance and aid of public officers a concerted drive to
wipe out unionism. In the drive, the New York Times has
reported, "local authorities in the cotton counties took
sides with the ranchers."
Anti-labor injunctions flowed thick and fast. When it
seemed probable that a Federal judge was about to enjoin
police attacks on strike meetings, the San Diego Sun
blazoned the declaration of a "peace officer" that "there
will be bloodshed" in such an event.
On April 24, 1934, the District Attorney of Sacramento
County hired private detectives to "investigate" union
leaders and "reds." Under cover of the anti-"red" hysteria

during the San Francisco general strike, police raided

union Offices late in July, seized files, and jailed for "va-
grancy" workers arrested in committee meeting and in
their own residences. The arrested included Pat Chambers,
the union's state organizer; Caroline Decker, its secretary;
active unionists such as Jack Warnick and Norman Mini,
 WHERE LIFE Is BETTER 283

and fourteen others. Shortly after the Grand Jury returned

indictments for criminal syndicalism.
All efforts to build a united front defense of the prison-
ers failed, with plenty of headaches for everybody con-
cerned. The
reasons for this failure are sufficiently ex-

plained in Herbert Solow's pamphlet, "Union Smashing

in Sacramento," published by the National Sacramento

Appeal Committee. Later eight of the defendants were

convicted and sentenced to long terms.

I took my ownheadache on a hiking expedition over

the Marin My companion was a young student, the
hills.

daughter of well-to-do parents. She was not a communist.

In fact she was utterly indifferent to any aspect of the
social struggle. She was exceptionally gifted and intelli-

gent, I thought. But these gifts and all her energy were
concentrated upon a single objective: that of preparing
herself for her chosen profession. I tried to discuss with
her the social content, the social obligations and the pres-
ent social stultification of that profession. She wasn't in-
terested. The burden of learning even one specialized
field was infinitely difficult and exacting. She could think
of nothing else.
That, was one reason why there weren't more
I reflected,

radical young students. She felt that her first duty was
to master her subject and then to establish her economic

independence. The university, she realized, was scarcely a

part of the real world. For her it might be a means to
participation in the real world. She had to become a part
of that real world, whatever it was, however abjectly con-
284 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
fused and ugly, before she could begin to think about
it.
rejecting
Many thousands of students, graduated during the de-
pression, had not become a part of that real world, might
never become a part of it. Idle, dependent, with little
hope of real jobs or real marriage, revolted by the make-
believe of CWA, FERA, and WPA
"made jobs" which
gave them little chance to use their training, what would
they do, to what savior would they turn? I talked to a

good many of them on my trip, but they didn't know and

I don't know. As far as I can make out, nobody knows.

All we know is that they went fascist in Italy and Ger-

many. And if they behave otherwise in America it will
be little short of a miracle.

I stayed only a few days more

in the Bay Region, but

long enough my by
for time admittedly morbid ap-
this

prehension of war to get another fillip. When the trans-

bay bridge to Oakland was completed, there would be an
exposition to celebrate the event. Plans were already being
made. One group of business men wanted to place the
exposition in the South Basin, a comparatively undevel-
oped outlying area, excellent as to climate, where the ex-

position structures could be preserved for permanent use.

Another wanted it to be placed on tiny fog-swept Yerba
Buena island. Why? Because then, after the exposition was
over, the necessary grading would have been done for an
airport, a military airport. And the decision in favor of
Yerba Buena was practically assured. It would be another
Pacific Coast war base, I reflected. Also a strategic base for

military operations in case, some time in the far future,

 WHERE LIFE Is BETTER 285
another general strike should attain insurrectionary di-

mensions.

Hollywood was calling me, Hollywood, the Holy City,

the Mecca of all good American dreamers. My head was
full of big ideas for the picturization of what I had seen
and thought. Surely there must be some way of cracking
that oyster. . . But I was no Beauty Queen, as I was
.

shortly to learn.
 DREAM FACTORY

little boy, having tossed his paper bag filled with

THE water into the air for the pleasure of observing its
descent upon the head of his playmate, remarks sagely,
"What goes up, must come down." Similarly Hollywood,
observing the rise and fall of stars, directors and writers,
the thesis, antithesis and synthesis of Hollywood life in
general, is propelled into the higher realms of philosophy.
Just as M. Jourdain marveled at his achievement of prose,
so Hollywood is dazzled by the perception that it has been

acting dialectically all its life; effortlessly, unconsciously.

Stupendous. Colossal. It's a law. It's a system!
The visitor encounters these Hollywood philosophers
in the most unexpected places. For example, it was one
of the most eminent defenders of Hollywood's New Purity
who declared to the writer: "If we don't give 'em sh-t,
(thesis), we lose our shirts" (antithesis). The synthesis, of
course, is that we do give it to them, but with a moral end-
ing and perfumes by Max Factor. Then (thesis), the
women's clubs, the Catholic Bishops, and the state censor-
ship boards, having a vested interest and opportunity in
the matter, start caterwauling. Antithesis: we give them
"Little Women," "The Little Minister," and little "David

Copperfield." Synthesis: the state censorship boards are

pretty sore, because the purer the movies, the worse their
286
 DREAM FACTORY 287

business; also there are signs that the fans are becoming
fed up with purity. So we continue in the safe terrain of
the but look for the hotter classics. Little "David
classics,

Copperfield" was not so hot.

There are other, and even more interesting ways in
which this dialectical process works out. The men and
women, many of them finely gifted, who are employed in
the manufacture of this tripe, become fed up with the busi-
ness. To paraphrase a Hollywood wit, they work terribly

hard, they lose their hair, their teeth and their virtue, and
what do they get out of it? Nothing but a lousy fortune.
Hollywood is organized and capitalized evasion of real-
ity and of the problem of art, which is to deal with reality
and to tell the truth, however abstractly or symbolically.
It is a vast, departmentalized, delicately coordinated dream
factory. The industry is more necessary, hence more stable
than steel, or housing, or power. True, in the contraction
of the economy since 1929, the movie industry also suf-
fered, but less, proportionately, than almost any other
major industry except food products. Indeed, the suffer-
ing and bewilderment of the depression have augmented
the demand for dreams, insofar as it became less and less

possible for the average person to master or adjust himself

to the intolerable realities of disemployment and destitu-
tion. The stream of dimes and quarters contracted, but
the industry rationalized itself to deal with the new con-
dition. The exhibitors gave two dreams for a quarter in-
stead of one. Independent producers stepped into the
breach and provided cheaply produced "featurettes" to
supplement the big feature pictures. The "quickie" de-
partment of the industry ground out low grade pap for
288 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
the all-night nickelodeons which more than ever on win-
ter nights became warm sanctuaries for the atomic drift
of the utterly destitute and damned. Asleep or waking,
these lost souls are lulled in dreams. Who
shall call un-
merciful a civilization that can contrive so vast and effi-

cient a euthanasia?
To meet the challenge of the depression, the bankers,
the executives, the directors, technicians, writers and
artists who devote themselves to the fabrication of this
dream achieved miracles of invention and organiza-
stuff

tion, equaling, if not surpassing, such purely material tri-

umphs as the Ford production line. After all, Ford is con-

cerned merely with the comparatively simple, two-dimen-
sional problem of coordinating men and materials. But
the movies is both an industry and an art; the producer
must manipulate not merely the tangible realities of sets,
lighting, the complex techniques of sound photography,
the multitude of crafts represented on the mile-square area
of a motion picture lot, but also the intangibles of art, of
the dream.
The bulk of themotion picture audiences are from 16
to 26 years old. That means that the industry must provide
dreams acceptable to the lowest common denominator of
that thirty-million-weak, predominantly adolescent audi-
ence. Amusement or entertainment all else is taboo.

Young love. Glamor. Sensation. Escape. If the industry

fails to give them these it loses its shirt.

The industry tries to serve, yet it does lose its shirt with
distressing frequency. In fact, it is estimated that the peri-

odicity of the panic cycle in the motion picture industry

 DREAM FACTORY 289
isthree or four years, as against seven or eight years for
industry as a whole.
The production of each big picture, or dream, is a small
war in itself, fought with all the resources of modern sci-
ence, mobilizing armies of technicians, craftsmen, artists,
writers, management experts, research workers, actors, ex-
tras, and miscellaneous soldiers and camp followers; con-
ducted in the synthetic dream terrain of the motion picture
lot; generaled by over-worked, nerve-shattered executives
whose $ioo,ooo-a-year jobs hang always by a hair. The
war starts when the idea of the picture is born; it ac-
celerates terrifically as soon as the picture goes into pro-
duction. This dream will cost about $500,000 to make;
it must click the box-office turnstiles the world over at
least 30,000,000 times before the producer gets a cent out
of it. Moreover, when we break the retail price of the
dream into its component parts, we find that the manu-
facturer gets less than 10 per cent of that box-office quar-
ter, or rather seventeen cents, which is the average ad-
mission price.
Out of this war a dream must issue which will make the
world not safe exactly, but momentarily endurable for
the thirty, or hundred million people who must
fifty,
dream this dream so that the stars may be paid $2,500 a
week, the top executives their bonuses, and the bankers,
of course, their proper return on their investment. By this
time the bankers own most
of the industry. They are try-

ing to stabilize these dream battles, to rationalize these

wars, but it isn't easy. Even as I write, their lamentations
can be heard all the way from Wall Street to Hollywood.
All is fair in motion picture love and war. War is hell,
2go CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
but in Hollywood such a soft hell. I sat on the sun porch
of one of those admirable neo-Spanish Hollywood villas,

vaguely conscious of the meretricious, derivative elo-

quence of the mocking birds, and watching spellbound

the quick, sensitive hands of a motion picture director
who was describing with passion the mayhem perpetrated
upon his last pictureby the collaborative idiocy of writers,
supervisors, and the producer. A
child of the Russian

pogroms, for twenty years engaged in the manufacture of

the shoddy dream-stuff by which the producers save their
man's every gesture was the gesture of an artist.
shirts, this
His verbal images were a succession of brilliant camera
shots; he thought, felt, lived pictures, not as a merchant
but as an artist.
There was no denying the earnestness of the man. He
was badly hurt, and not in his pocketbook. He wailed, he
gesticulated, he prophesied in language reminiscent of
Jeremiah, he invoked the wrath of Jehovah on the mis-
creants. He all but wept; the blood ran out of his shoes.
To distract him from his grief, someone mentioned
King Vidor's recent production, "Our Daily Bread." In-

stantly, the man's hands moved into interpretive margi-

nalia upon that work which he greatly admired, despite
its defects. He too was a farmer, he explained. As a boy

of seven he had carried buckets of water and poured them

into big vats piped to irrigate the drought-stricken Russian

steppe. He remembered sitting in a darkened room after

a pogrom, and sharing in the distribution of burned apples
to half a dozen starving families.
The grasp of reality, the truth, the passion of the artist
were quick in this man, as in scores of other directors,
 DREAM FACTORY 291

writers, cameramen, and artists scattered throughout the

industry. The reality is evaded, the truth is frustrated, the
is stultified; that is what, more than anything else,
passion
makes Hollywood a hell with Bedlamite trimmings. But
the artists are there and a saving percentage of them strug-
gle desperately to put art into pictures. They gloat over
small successes; they bleed over their defeats. They rave,
risk their jobs, work nights and Sundays, lose their teeth,
their hair, and their virtue. For what? Not solely for a

lousy fortune. The big salaries paid in the upper brackets

are undoubtedly a factor, but one doubts that money alone
could command such intensity of effort.
Consider the culminating moment when, after weeks of
preparation during which the huge, delicately coordinated
resources of the studio have been stretched to the utmost,
the big scene of a picture is about to be shot. Ten writers
have worked on the script. Squads of carpenters, painters
and technicians have timed their effort to reach comple-
tion on the particular day when the stars and the director
are available according to the terms of their contracts.

They have built a battleship swimming in a synthetic

ocean, perhaps, or a magnificent cathedral out of sticks and
plaster. The lifework of an animal trainer or an electronic
engineer isabout to be given to the world. The picture,
which is already being sold to the distributors for release
on a definite date, has already cost fifty, a hundred thou-
sand, five hundred thousand dollars, as well as several nerv-
ous breakdowns. A
bell rings, a red light goes on outside
the studio door, the cameras whir. It is a breathless mo-
ment.
Since the advent of sound, the director cannot hiss, as in
292 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
the past: "Come on, honey, gimme lust!" But the enforced
silence is rich with irony. Much genuine art, much science,
and heroic struggle have gone into a collective effort, the
net result of which is likely in the majority of cases to be
humanly false, and socially anaes-
artistically worthless,
theticand corruptive. Many of the people involved are
aware of this. But when that much money has been spent
and that much human effort mobilized toward the ob-
jective of giving the flappers of four continents a vicarious
thrill, the matter must be taken seriously, on the set at
least.

Motion picture people are not lacking in humor. The

abler ones laugh well and curse well. Artistically, their
occupation tends to be a kind of whoredom and this they
freely acknowledge. But they are quick to resent the
pharisaism of the outsider who fails to recognize, first,
that even at its worst the commercial motion picture ex-
hibits a steadily rising level of craftsmanship; this crafts-

manship has values and yields satisfactions in and of itself,

and its improvement is clearly due to the concentration

of capable writers and artists in Hollywood. Second, there

is always the chance of coupling the dream with the real-

of vivifying the contemporary fact in other words of

ity,

making this Hollywood hell give birth to a work of art

which will be exhibited to a world audience.
Ithappens occasionally. But Hollywood is hell just the
same. The shoddy dream-stuff infects the minds and hearts
of those who make it. The fog of dreams drifts back and
fillsthe canyons of this phony, sprawling dream-capital, so
that the ceiling is always pretty low and imaginative flights
are difficult. Pecuniary values reign. If you want a job in
 DREAM FACTORY 293

pictures, they tell you not to be seen lunching with any-

body who makes less than $500 a week. Careerism and
sycophancy are rife. Nobody is secure. Those who are in
set up bars against those who are out. Once out it is hard

to come back. A successful screen writer told me he would

rather be broke in any other town in the world than in

Hollywood. It is shameful, it denotes lack of virtue not

to be in a position to command a price for one's virtue.
It is a fate worse than death. Your best friends barely speak
to you. You skulk around corners.
The of a star averages six years. Ex-stars haunt the
life

casting offices seeking bit parts. In 1933, 8,000 actors and

actresseswere listed as seeking employment and only 1,500
were employed. A once famous actress, around whom a
million-dollar company was once organized, is now on
relief.

Significantly, Hollywood's favorite word is "phony."

"It's as phony as Nicholas Murray Butler," commented my
guide when, unable to believe that a miraculously con-

vincing reproduction of a Gothic arch was faked, I went

up and tapped on its inch-thin canvas and plaster. A while
back a group of distinguished naval officers issued from a
restaurant to be greeted on the curb by the jeers of the

sophisticated Hollywood populace: "Phonies! What pic-

ture are youse fellows extras for?"
I had supposed Hollywood romances were also
that the

phony, but was assured that this is not the case. They are

merely life imitating the adolescent pseudo-art of the

screen. The stars who marry and divorce with such fluency
are not mere slaves of carnality. On the contrary they are
294 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
the most idealistic and illusioned of people. Each new
romance is a grand passion, the perfect partnership.
This seemed incredible enough, but even more astonish-
ing the migration of social registerites into the films.
is

Both the fact and a veteran motion picture man's interpre-

tation of the fact are worth recording:
"See the toffs at the next table? They're from Santa Bar-
bara. The
pictures give so potent an illusion of class ex-
istence that the society people cultivate the motion picture
stars. They do bit parts in the glamor films, actually think-
ing that they are coming into an extension of their own
lives.

"Is it possible," he continued, "that the movies are less

phony than the lives of the upper classes in this period?

Maybe that's it.

Maybe the toffs are living in hell; when
they get parts in the movies it's as if every so often the
damned were permitted to simulate living people."
Dismiss this, if you like, as the theory-spinning of a
jealous professional mime. Maybe the movies are not a
heaven for the toffs, but filmdom does become a kind of
hell for the professionals. Stars, writers, motion picture

people in general, feel a certain exile from reality and are

worried and distressed by it. The chronic exhibitionism
of Hollywood doesn't quite satisfy them. They go to the
races at Santa Anita where the payoff on a single Saturday
was $500,000, of which the track got 8 per cent and the
state 4 per cent. All the screen notables are there, and the
fact that Mr. Zauberstein, the writer, is seen with Mr.

Spielberg, the producer, is supposed to help keep Mr.

Zauberstein in the money.
But it is all
pretty phony. Every now and then some of
 DREAM FACTORY 295

the moregifted and sensitive motion picture people try

to break out of the dream world of Hollywood. They want
to establishsome contact with the real world of strikes,
and political crisis which is never
of destitution, of social
shown in the pictures except when some socially conscious
producer like King Vidor takes the bit in his teeth and
gambles his own money. These rebels clandestinely attend
Marxian study classes. They listen sympathetically to the
miseries of the lettuce workers toiling in the Imperial Val-

ley a couple of hundred miles south. They too would like

to live authentically in the real world, if only their con-
tractswould permit them to do so.
But the contracts are very specific. The slave of the
screen owes a duty to his public. He must risk no publicity
which would impair the box-office value of his name. So
that for the most part Hollywood keeps faith with the
dream and chews the sour cud of its own phoniness.
It is, in fact, a jealous and exclusive phoniness; a moated
and ramparted hell. When you come in from the outside,
everybody suspects you of "trying to break into the
movies"; in other words, of wanting to ladle up, for a
price, some of the dream-stuff brewed in this hell.

Agents, directors, producers, writers, are closely guarded

by their secretaries. The private telephone is almost uni-
versal. I phoned a well-known writer's secretary and was
subjected to a formal inquisition. Why did I want to see
Mr. Smith? Did I want a job? What kind of a job? Finally,
I blew up and declaimed: "Listen, I'm the only man in the

world who doesn't want a job in this damned town. I'm

unique. I'm colossal."
The secretary was completely unmoved and completely
296 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER

skeptical. Rightly so, I reflected, as I hung up the receiver.

The movies, potentially at least, is the greatest art form
we have and the greatest medium communica-
of social
tion. Of course, I'd give my shirt do something with
to
the movies. So would almost any writer. But the ramparts
are high and the people inside are pretty sad-eyed. Break-

ing in is only the beginning. The real job is to do some-

thing serious after you get in. However, the movies, I

reflected, are no
different in this respect from any other

industry. Newspapermen are in the same fix. And engineers

any group of workers, in fact, in relation to the false and
exploitative conditions of their employment. I had a look
at the briefs submitted to the NRA
by the Screen Actors
Guild and the Screen Writers Guild and became con-
vinced that as respects labor relations the movie industry
does not differ essentially from any other highly developed
mass production industry.

Will the Dream-Makers Strike?

The Screen Writers Guild and the Screen Actors

Guild, having made the complete circuit of the National
Run Around, are fighting for their rights under the Wag-
ner Labor Relations Bill, and to this end have filed briefs

with the new Labor Board. The producers, as might be

expected, the
assert, first, that
shipment of positive film
has nothing to do with interstate commerce, and second,
that the law is unconstitutional anyway.
A mere listing of the elements of the present situation
in Hollywood will indicate how closely it
approximates
 DREAM FACTORY 297

the standard labor relations setup in almost any mass pro-

duction industry. Roughly, these elements are:
1. A vertical union of actors, called the Screen Actors
Guild, but in fact a union with an A. F. of L. charter,
affiliated with the Associated Actors and Artistes of
America, which controlled by Actors Equity. The mem-
is

bership is approximately 2,500 and ranges in status all

the way from $io,ooo-a-week stars like Eddie Cantor, its

president, to free-lance actors who are lucky if they make

$2,500 a year.
2. A vertical union of writers, called the Screen Writers
Guild, affiliated with the Authors League, with a mem-
bership of about 800, ranging in membership from $50,-
ooo-a-year pen pushers to $5O-a-week studio hacks.
3. Acompany union, called the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences, organized by Louis B. Mayer
and Douglas Fairbanks in 1927, with branches for writers,
directors, actors, producers, and technicians. Hollywood
*

cynics refer to the Academy as a 'double bastard out of

the French Academy," without explaining the genealogical

implications of the phrase. It gives annual prizes, pretends

to prescribe minimum contracts, adjusts wage, contract
and other disputes, and otherwise attempts to harmonize
employer-employee relations on the "one happy family"
theory. It has full recognition from the producers, and is
in fact their creature, whereas the Guilds have none ex-

cept such recognition as is

implied by the bootleg nego-
tiations conducted with the producers by the Guilds in
behalf of their members. By this time there are compara-

tively few actors and writers left in the Academy.

298 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
4. A labor pool consisting in effect of most of the actors
and writers of America and of all foreign countries in-
cluding the Scandinavian.
Huge disparities of compensation and of treatment
5.
as between the producers, the executives, the stars and the
lower professional and labor categories. In 1931, 75 execu-
tives received an average of $92,000 apiece, or 2.68% of
the gross receipts of the industry. In 1933, 70 executives
received an average of $53,000 apiece, or 1.89% of the
gross. In 1933, 5,134 actors, including the stars, received
an average of $3,298 apiece, and 266,000 extra players re-
ceived $9.54 apiece. Three hundred and seven writers reg-
ularly employed received an average of $13,500 apiece,
while 707 writers not regularly employed received an aver-
age of $2,750 apiece. The 17,678 studio mechanics received
an average of $513 apiece. The 17,678 clerical workers re-
ceived an average of $1,309 apiece. Taking the total num-
ber of 317,000 individuals employed in the movies in
1933, the average compensation was $256 apiece. Implicit
in these figures, of course, are a high degree of irregularity
and insecurity of employment, and, considering the repu-
tation of the movies as a source of easy money, an astonish-

ingly low level of compensation for the lower professional

and labor categories.
6. An
industry in the throes of the "rationalization" pre-
scribed by the bankers who own most of it, and in the
red since 1932. The industry had gross receipts of $259,-
000,000 in 1931 and showed a net profit of $18,000,000.
In 1932 the gross was $209,000,000 and the net loss $26,-
000,000. In 1933 the gross was $197,000,000 and the net
loss $9,000,000.
 DREAM FACTORY 299

7. A red-baiting factor susceptible of effective exploita-

tion when, as, and if the producers get in a tight spot.
Witness the attempt of the Hearst press to discredit James
Cagney because of his. highly creditable sympathy for
California's exploited "stoop labor" in the lettuce fields,
and the resignation of Sam Ornitz from the executive
board of the Screen Writers Guild. (It is worth noting
that without exception the actors and writers on whom
the red label has been pinned are among the most gifted
and capable artists in Hollywood.)
Just how, one is moved to ask, does this setup differ
from the standard labor relations setup in almost any
highly developed mass production industry? It does not
differ essentially, but there are certain special conditions
which the producers, and the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences as the instrument of the producers, have
chosen to emphasize for understandable reasons. Their
thesis, often reiterated, is that the actors and writers whose
more or less synthetic reputations dazzle the eyes, con-
found the ears, and nourish the illusions of the planetary
multitude that these are gentle people, artists, profes-
sional men and women; that would be shameful to
it

demean them to the status of mere laborers in filmdom's

garden of dreams. They are not, so runs the argument,

replaceable parts in an industrial machine, but individuals
of varying capacity whose value to the industry is a mat-
ter of demand measurable at the box office. They are
therefore quite capable of protecting themselves by indi-
vidual bargaining and in fact do so quite successfully.
This argument applies, of course, only to the stars and to
the leading directors and writers, and to them only with
300 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
considerable qualification. When the attention of the mag-
nates is called to some of the wage statistics above cited,
they reek with sentimental concern, but tend to be defi-
cient in the matter of remedies, as well as highly resistant
to the present drive for union organization. By and large,
in fact, the movie employers are just about as stiff-necked
as U. S. Steel or General Motors. They are represented by
exceedingly capable counsel, and it is interesting to note
that the same firm represents both the producers and the

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. One is

reminded of the National Steel Labor Board hearings in

Pittsburgh, when counsel for the company union and

counsel for the steel corporation sat together, swapped
notes, and pounded the table in unison.
The issues for which the Guilds are fighting are, first,

recognition by the producers, without which it is difficult

to exercise effective pressure toward the correction of the
numerous abuses by both actors and writers. But
suffered

recognition is what the producers are determined

precisely
not to grant; the more it is urged, the more elaborate the
build-up of the Academy which, while theoretically repre-
senting the interests of all who are involved, remains se-
curely in the control of the producers. The screen actors,
through Equity, have been fighting vainly for recognition
for fifteen years. For the writers, the break came with the
threat of the 50 per cent permanent cut in 1933. At that
time Ralph Block, president of the Screen Writers Guild
in 1934, and Oliver Garett resigned from the Academy,
openly calling it a company union, and attempted to put
some life into the Screen Writers Guild which had been
organized some years before. With the advent of the NRA,
 DREAM FACTORY 301

the producers saw a chance to "rationalize" the business,

specifically by setting up a general booking office and con-
trolling inter-studio competition for the services of actors
and writers. Both Guilds had to fight the disabilities placed
upon them in the first drafts of the Motion Picture Code.
There followed a period of jockeying back and forth be-
tween Washington and Hollywood, out of which eventu-
ated the present stalemate.
Among the major grievances recited in the brief submit-
ted by the Screen Actors Guild are the following:
That in 1933 one quarter of the 1,563 actors who
worked made less than $1,000, one-half made less than
$2,000 and three quarters made less than $5,000. In addi-
tion pointed out
it is that this less-than-professional wage
is
paid during an exceptionally brief working life.

According to the report of the Motion Picture Code

Administrator, Sol Rosenblatt, the actors received only
one and three quarters cents of each dollar that came into
the box office. The actors' brief therefore concludes with
some reason that "if a betterment in actors' working con-
ditions doubled the cost of actors' salaries, it would not
even make a dent in the business." The brief also calls
attention to the heavy "take" of the film executives, espe-
cially the split to Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, and
Robert Rubin, which totaled $8,320,173 in the four years
of 1929-32. It points out that while the five-year no-strike

agreement, negotiated in 1930 through the Academy, guar-

anteed a twelve-hour rest period between calls, and con-
tinuous employment, both concessions were subsequently
abrogated in practice. An important clause in the working
rules proposed in the Actors Guild brief is that forbidding
302 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
an actor to waive the Although the present Acad-
rules.

emy makes
free-lance contract compulsory a twelve-hour
rest period, the Guild brief points out that "whenever the
producer does not want to give a twelve-hour rest period
he asks the actor to waive it, and most actors, needing work
and not being in a strong enough position to demand their
rights, are forced to waive the provision whether they like
it or not."
Since the advent of sound, the position of the writers
in the industry has been strengthened. The Screen Writers
Guild now has about 800 members and although it is not
recognized by the producers, it settled last year about 145
disputes between its members and their employers. The
Guild's membership contract cannot be invalidated by
resignation and is enforcible by a $10,000 fine. It has a
rule, thus far inoperative, which provides that "no mem-
ber shall collaborate with a non-guild member." In other
words the Guild has the machinery for achieving a closed
shop, if it should ever become powerful enough to stage
an effective strike or threat of strike.

Laymen accustomed to regard Hollywood as a fountain

of easy money are invited to consider the present weekly

wages of the readers on whose synopses the magnates of

the industry base their imperial decisions. These salaries
run from nothing at all it's your chance to learn the busi-
nessto an average of $47.50 and $50 at Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer and Paramount. Much of the reading is done on a
piece-work basis $2 to $5 for synopsizing a full-length
novel. The translators are equally exploited and the
Guild's demand for a $5O-a-week minimum is modest
enough in all conscience.
 DREAM FACTORY 303

As was expected, the producers attempted to take the

edge off the Screen Actors' brief by instituting through the
Academy a new five-year basic agreement and minimum
contract which embody a number of concessions, but evade
the basic question at issue. That is the recognition of an
actors' union strong enough and independent enough to

protect its members and ensure the observance of fair-

practice rules. The producers have adopted a similar pro-
cedure with respect to the writers.
It seems likely that sooner or later, the screen actors

and writers, like the steel and automotive workers, will

become convinced that the administration either will not
or cannot help them, and that they will have to help them-
selves without benefit of Washington. When that time ar-
rives, the dream-makers may or may not strike for the
objective to which all others are now subordinated, the
Guild shop. If they don't, they will continue to suffer from
the progressive "rationalization" of the industry, designed
to keep the executive salaries pretty much intact, but to
reduce the other elements of production cost sufficiently
to restore profits. If they strike and win they may be in
a position to consider the wider social implications of their

employment. A degree of self-respect and security for the

dream-makers would certainly result in an improvement
of their product and maybe the producers wouldn't lose
their shirts after all.

It interesting to speculate upon the social conse-

is

quences of even a brief suspension of Hollywood's activi-

ties. Hollywood is the circus department of an economy

and culture which has reached the bread-and-circuses

stage. Cut out the circuses and the struggle for bread
304 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
might be intensified; the masses: might be tempted to
dream their own dreamseven to stage their own mob
scenes. Conceivably, the administration has more than
one reason for not wanting a strike of the dream-makers.
 26
NOT GREEK, BUT ROMAN

I was in the Middle West, seemed to me

it

WHILE that Detroit, the capital of Mobilia, was the key

But after a stay of six weeks in California,
city of America.
I began to realize that the economic and political activities

centering about Los Angeles give that city an almost equal

significance.
Ironically enough, the manufacture of the American
dream is concentrated in a physical area that reeks with
the grimmest of social and economic facts. The city state
which Los Angeles has erected in the southern California
desert is not Greek, but Roman; and so terrific is the pace
of the modernsocial process that already, after a brief half-

century of soaring expansion, one saw that the empire of

Chandler and Hearst was entering its decadent period. Still
growing, that desert puff-ball was softening at the core. In
the earlier period, while the American capitalist economy
was still expanding, Los Angeles had sucked the juice of
middle-class savings from the entire continent. It was these
middle-class hordes who had swarmed over those sun-
drenched hills and raised a katydid chant of peace and
plenty, until
Until the depression touched their modest vines and
fig trees with the first breath of an economic autumn that
these half-independent sitters-in-the-sun had never counted
305
306 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
on. They suffered more or less patiently until the election
of 1934, when, from the point of view of those stern pro-
consuls, Hearst and Chandler, they went wild. They found
an admirably representative leader in Upton Sinclair, with
his Savonarola-like countenance, his genius for publicity,
and his extraordinary capacity for hypnotizing himself and
others with pseudo-revolutionary pipe-dreams.
In a way, EPIC was the revolution gone Hollywood. At
the pro-consuls and their satraps in both southern and
first

northern California didn't take it seriously. I talked to

some professional publicity people who had been hired to
back-fire the political conflagration that almost swept Sin-
clair into office. They told me indignantly that not until
the last two months of the campaign did the big shots be-
come scared enough to overcome their characteristic finan-
cial inhibitions. But in that last-minute panic they shoveled
out the cash in every direction. It was, as Sinclair has testi-

fied, a thoroughly brutal and unscrupulous job. The pub-

licity hacks referred to hurriedly divided the population

of the state into realistic sociological classifications: so
many Baptists, Methodists, Seventh Day Adventists, and
other fundamentalists; so many Christian Scientists, so
many Mormons, etc. They then proceeded to excerpt pas-
sages from the voluminous works of Mr. Sinclair, and by
appropriate demagogic devices demonstrate to the elec-
torate that Sinclair was against God, against the Home,

against Mary Baker Eddy, against everything the sitters-

in-the-sun were supposed to be for.
It worked, to a degree. What really turned the tide,
however, was the coercion of the employed section of the
voters by their employers. In the end, almost the whole
of California business and industry was mobilized to beat
 NOT GREEK, BUT ROMAN 307

Sinclair, including, of course, the motion picture industry.

Every dream-maker was asked to contribute a day of fast

and prayer in order to make California safe for M.G.M.,
Paramount, Warner Brothers, Carl Laemmle, Jr., etc., and

few, indeed, were in a position to decline.

I talked to one of the eminent functionaries who had
helped to mobilize the dream-makers against and
Sinclair,
he struck me as one of the funniest Romans of them all.

He was, he assured me, a liberal and a pacifist. He had just

fought, bled and died vainly, he admitted to induce a
big producer to film Sir Philip Gibbs' latest fictional effort
in the field of painless pacifism. He was a friendly soul
who, like so many of the Hollywood dignitaries, steamed
devotion to Art and loyalty to the Flag out of every pore.
Was he Sincere? I think so. Hollywood specializes in the
manufacture of Sincere Phonies, just as the advertising
business manufactures Sincere Snobs.
Mr. Hearst is not funny, but many of his drummer boys
are. This, I reflected, was much like the Rome of the later
Caesars. One has only to read Terence and other writers
of the Roman decadence, to realize that the plutocrats of
that period were funny enough after their fashion.
Nevertheless, the empire of southern California was, I
felt, destined to expand even during the declining phase

of the national capitalist economy. In the regional com-

petition which would characterize the period ahead, south-

ern California was well-equipped to survive. Water and
power, the major physiographic requirements, would soon
be available from Boulder Dam. With sufficient water, the
productivity of the Imperial, Coachella, and other valleys
could be greatly expanded. The port of Los Angeles was
steadily being improved it too would be an important
308 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
base of military operations in the event of a war in the
Pacific. Moreover, Los Angeles business was already hier-

archical, and at least potentially fascist; it was far ahead of

San Francisco in that respect. As for the tendency of the
increasingly destitute middle class to revolt, that would be
taken care of, along fascist lines, when the necessity arose.
The centralization of power was already achieved. The
corporative forms of its administration the Associated
Farmers, Anti-Communist League, etc., were already
emerging. Clearly Los Angeles had a future a fascist
future.
How quickly that future was shading into the present
I was soon to learn.
During my last days in Hollywood I noticed an El
Centro newspaper dispatch to the effect that two lettuce
workers had been killed by deputized strikebreakers. It
was a suspiciously muted and colorless story, and thinking
that the newspapers to which I contributed might want a

special article, I wired them. Two editors immediately

authorized me to send stories. Fine. I
had always been curi-
ous about the Imperial Valley. Ellis O. Jones had been
telling me about the sojourn in the desert he suffered
when he tried to defend the cause of civil liberty in the
Valley. In addition, I had before me the long record of
beatings and expulsions which had followed the attempts
of the Agricultural and Cannery Workers Union to organ-
ize the "stoop labor" of the Valley during the preceding
year. But in this instance I was merely a newspaperman
after a story. So that when I pointed car for El Centro,
my
it never occurred to methat I might be heading for
trouble.
 27
WELCOME TO EL CENTRO
(Dispatch to the New York Evening Post)

ENTINEL, Arizona. am
writing this in the lee of a
I

cactus about a hundred miles east of the California

border, across which I and my traveling companion were

escorted three hours ago by six deputy sheriffs represent-

ing the law and order of the Imperial Valley. We

stayed
three days and three nights in El Centre, county seat of

Imperial County, less than twenty-four hours of which

were spent in jail. That, if not a record, is well above the
average achieved by the assorted liberals, radicals, preach-
ers, journalists and lawyers who have visited the Valley

during the past year.

As you may have heard, the Valley has been having a
strike of the lettuce packers and trimmers, which was cli-
maxed ten days ago by the killing of two strikers by armed
and deputized strikebreakers. As a cruising journalist, I
was duly authorized to write two lettuce stories for two
publications, presenting both sides of the controversy, and,
please, no Russian dressing. Accordingly, in my sly sub-
versive way, I presented my credentials to the Sheriff, the

army captain who represented the United States Depart-

ment of Labor, the deputy labor commissioner for the
state, the county health officer, the state emergency relief
309
310 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
director, the local newspapers, C. B. Lawrence, Secretary-
Treasurer of the Fruit and Vegetable Workers Union of
California, the respectable A. F. of L. union that staged
the strike, Fred Bright, a prominent lettuce and cantaloupe
grower and shipper, and Chester B. Moore, Secretary of
the Western Growers Protective Association. The dispro-
in this list would seem, if anything, to favor the
portion
employers. If the story slants the other way, it is, first,
because that is the slant of the facts and, second, because
Chet Moore cut short our welcome to El Centro. The
police escort, incidentally, was at our request; we heard
rumors of vigilantes organizing.
Maybe I do Chet wrong, but it was strangely coincident
that my second interview with Mr. Moore occurred on the

morning of the day of our arrest; that at this interview he

showed me in high dudgeon a Washington dispatch
printed in the New York Evening Post summarizing the
Leonard-Lubin report of the Communist-led strike in the
Valley last year; that he said then that if at the previous
interview he had known I represented any such biased,
subversive sheet, he would have kicked me out.
Finally, Chet presided beamingly over the tableau that
afternoon when the Sheriff and a dozen deputies and stool
pigeons went through my car and crowed over the assorted
radical literature it contained. They found everything
from the Proletarian Party and the Communist League of
Action to Chamber of Commerce boost literature and a
booklet touting Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning. One
of the stools insisted on reading this booklet through from
cover to cover; I suspect he thought it was written in code.
I twitched at his sleeve and tried to say a good word for
 WELCOME TO EL CENTRO 311

my own book, Our Master's Voice: Advertising, but he

sternly pushed me aside.Another one ran off with Lewis
Corey's Decline of American Capitalism like an ant push-
ing a big crumb. Out of the tail of my eye I saw a third

mired in the second volume of Recent Social Changes. I

think that one died seeking air.
Asked to explain this literature, I suggested that this was
perhaps the normal haul of a reporter who had been four
months on the road trying to get a notion of what was hap-
pening to the country. As to my personal views, I was cer-
tainly a radical, although not at the moment a member
of any political party. In fact I had spent fifteen years writ-

ing my opinions in books, magazines, and newspapers. It

was not wholly my fault, I intimated sadly, that apparently
I didn't have a single reader in the entire Imperial Valley.

As to my mission in El Centro, it was purely journalistic.

I had been getting the facts about the strike and its back-

groundthat, and nothing else, as the stupid stools who

had been tailing us knew perfectly well.
Meanwhile, this mob of Mack Sennett cops and stools
kept rummaging through my personal correspondence,
pawing over a dozen undecipherable notebooks, and other-
wise comporting themselves in terms of stale burlesque.
My companion, Charles Malamuth, a near-sighted Russian
Jew, by training a philologist, to whom I had offered trans-

portation across the continent, behaved nobly. He squinted

critically at their language until he had the sheriff and his
deputies hesitating over their verbs and adjectives like
spavined nags facing a water jump.
In the end they stuffed us in the El Centro can, already
crowded with the seventeen strikers arrested since the
312 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
strike, plus assorted American, Mexican, and Indian petty
offenders and deportees. Not altogether to our surprise, we
found that the best people of the Imperial Valley were in
jail. Moreover, they were in hearty agreement with us as
to the Hollywood-infected phoniness of the forces of law
and order. Whatever Chet Moore forgot to tell us about
the lettuce business we learned from the prisoners. We
didn't eat lettuce, of course, although it was wasting in the
fields all around us. We ate bread and potatoes and oat-
meal and dried peaches, supplemented by sugar and milk
bought and distributed cooperatively by the prisoners
through their kangaroo courts, which duly tried and fined
us for being dumb enough to come into the Imperial Val-
ley at all. My cell block had a population of seventeen,
with bunks for ten, so I slept on a couple of mattresses
spread in the corridor.
Malamuth was more fortunate, being befriended by no
less a personage than H. J. McGuire, the deputized strike-

breaker who is alleged to have shot and killed Paul Knight

in the course of the trouble on Sunday, Feb. 17, when
another striker, Kenneth Hamaker, is alleged to have been
killed by another deputized strikebreaker, Rudy Jensen.
McGuire and Jensen are being held for the grand jury
investigation which begins next week. It seems probable
that neither one of them will be prosecuted. But they
too will need police escorts when they leave the Valley,
and since fruit tramps wander widely, their usefulness as
strikebreakers anywhere west of the Mississippi seems
ended.
The strike was fading when we reached El Centre. Dur-
ing the first days the union had signed up eight sheds to
 WELCOME TO EL CENTRO 313

the Salinas contract based on the award of the Regional

Labor Board, headed by George Creel, which arbitrated
the Salinas strike last year. It was the resistance of the
growers to the application of this award to the Imperial
Valley that brought about the strike. This resistance was
organized and led by Chet Moore, whose chief function
seems to be that of labor fixer for the big grower-shippers.
The strike was practically ended by the time we left town;
local artisans, high school boys, and hitch-hikers, including
a woman with a dog, were pulled in to pack and trim let-
tuce. Both jobs require some skill and the growers un-

doubtedly lost a good deal of money through spoiled let-

tuce and inferior packs. They stand to lose more if the
boycott of scab brands, which is being instituted by the
A. F. of L., is at all effective.
However, most of the have either gone back to
strikers
work or left for other areas, and Chet Moore has scored
a "victory." He has convinced the fruit tramps that for all

practical purposes there is no difference between the

grower-shippers and the forces of "law and order." Sheriff
Bob Ware is himself a
pea grower, Chief of Police Sterling
Oswalt a lettuce grower and his brother, Frank Oswalt,
is

heads the forces of the state highway patrol. The fruit

tramps are further convinced that there is very little dif-
ference between the treatment accorded the strikers, or-
ganized with an A. F. of L. charter, and the short shrift
given the Communists who organized the Agricultural and
Cannery Workers Union last year. They are sore, and
openly contemptuous of both the grower-shippers and the
police; of the former because, in their opinion, they have
neither enough brains nor enough collective integrity to
314 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER

stop chiseling both their workers and each other, and

establish tolerable conditions in the industry; of the latter,
because they are hysterical with red phobia and have obvi-
ously gone Hollywood, with the consequence that two de-
cent workers were quite unnecessarily killed by deputized
strikebreakers who, at the very least, should never have
been armed with guns.
It may seem that the picture of the Valley police as
Mack Sennett tragi-comedians is overdrawn and personal.
It is not. Just before noon of the day we were released, a
hundred per cent American lettuce striker was brought
into my cell block, and the judge of the kangaroo court
made his customary request for a contribution to the mu-
tual fund.
"Hell," he shouted. "I'll be out of here in two hours.

Those ba ds have their nerve thinking they

can push me around. Grease balls, maybe, but not me.
You'd think this was some foreign country. These
goddamned phony deputies have been reading detective
stories. A guy comes up to me, no uniform, and says I'm

pinched, and starts shoving me. I lugged him one, the

,and his buddy comes up and I tell them to keep
their filthy hands off me, the bunch of hick cops. . . .

Look at this damned can I If a big timer got in here by mis-

take he'd go through it like Pluto water."
He steamed an hour, and he wasn't
off like this for

bluffing either. His lawyer came and he got out in consid-

erably less than two hours.
We said good-by to Sheriff Ware at one o'clock of the
day following our arrest. He had learned by wire that I
was some kind of a newspaperman after all, but he offered
 WELCOME TO EL CENTRO 315

no apologies. The Sheriff was once a fruit tramp himself

and personally seems a decent fellow, though handicapped
by the granite profile of a Hollywood mountie. He has
been put in a bad spot by the big shippers and he doesn't
like either them or the spot he is in. But he is a part of
the local red hysteria.
 28
BREAD-AND-BUTTER LETTER

Mr. Robert Ware, Sheriff of Imperial County

(The lowest down sheriff's office in the world)
El Centre, Calif.

DEAR COMRADE WARE:

Six months a long time to postpone the writing of the
is

customary "bread-and-butter letter" which is due you be-

cause of your thoughtfulness in according me and my trav-
eling companion the hospitality of the El Centro jail.
Please excuse this delay. I have been busy after my fashion,
and doubtless you have been busy after your fashion. But
I have thought of you often, Comrade Ware, and not al-

ways in terms of the unmixed hostility which you perhaps

expected.
A sheriff is after all a human being.
Even a stool pigeon,
I suppose, ishuman, although concerning the latter form
of life there is much to be said on both sides. But you are
an elected officer; moreover, you told me that you were
once a fruit tramp. Finally, our too-brief acquaintance
convinced me that you were miscast as an Imperial County
sheriff. That's a stool-pigeon's job, Comrade Ware, and

you don't really like stool pigeons any more than I do.
It would have been pleasant, Comrade Ware, if instead

316
 BREAD-AND-BUTTER LETTER 317
of having your deputies escort me out of the Valley, you
had said something like this:
"Comrade words 'pal' and 'brother' are also used
(the
among friendly and cooperative people), don't let's have
any hard feelings. If you have nothing else on for tonight,
have dinner with me. I know a little Mexican joint where
we can get away from this mob of dumb cops and stool
pigeons especially the stool pigeons and have a good
heart-to-heart talk."
I would have accepted with pleasure, Comrade Ware,

and here are some of the things I would have said to you:
First, concerning your jail. The nature of our society is

clearly defined by the physical arrangement and sub-

human atmosphere of our jails; they instantly dissolve the
make-believe of justice, order, humanity, with which we
beguile the tedium between revolution and revolution.
Every prisoner is bound to realize, the moment the door
of the cell block closes upon him, that this jail exists, not
to enforce justice and to discipline, rehabilitate, and re-
socialize offenders, but to remove, conceal and ultimately
to destroy the evidence of our social failure. As a society,
we bury the evidence of our social crimes in jails, work-
houses, poor farms, until this evidence becomes mountain-
ous, so that there are not jails enough to hold it.
Then the law becomes military law, the justice military
justice, and the human evidences of our social failure are
shot down without trial. The machine gun rattle of this

"justice" again dissolves the make-believe, but this time in

the open air, where all can see it, reflect, and learn. We
realize then yes, you too, Comrade Ware, must realize
it some day that the sands of this society are running out,
318 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
and the hour-glass must soon reverse itself. For what has
happened is this: the state has become the criminal and
the people its victims.

By time the best people are either in jail as today

this
in Germany or threatened with jail, with torture, with
death. The balance is broken and must right itself. There
must be a new and the people come out, the prison-
state,
ers of starvation come out. They revolt and erect a new
state on the grave of the state that has died. It is not true
that revolutionaries destroy the state power, Comrade
Ware. It is you, and even more the panic-stricken, violent,
and doomed people whom you serve it is you who destroy

the state. Social revolutionaries can and do take power

only when the capitalist state has destroyed itself, when
power and responsibility are to be had almost for the ask-
ing, and when only revolutionaries have enough moral
and intellectual integrity left to essay the gigantic task of
reconstruction.
This task is likely to entail more jailing and shooting,
always a brutal and inhuman business; but the hour-glass
cannot be turned back, nor can the sick-to-death society
heal itself without purging. The hope is always that the
new state power will "wither away" be superseded by the
functional, democratic forms of a cooperative society, al-
though hope has not yet been fulfilled.
this
This the process as revolutionaries see it, as even con-
is

servative historians see it, when decades and centuries of

time have cushioned the impact of events and made it safe
to tell how and why they happened. You were convinced,
Comrade Ware, that I was a revolutionary, a Communist.
I appreciated the compliment, I assure you, but in all fair-
 BREAD-AND-BUTTER LETTER 319

ness must decline it. I am not a member of the Commu-

I

nist Party, of theWorkers Party, or of any other revolu-

tionary group. I am not, in other words, one of our best
people whom it is your business to put in jail; whom the
Associated Farmers are organized to beat, and tar and
feather, and shoot.
You had one of those best people in your jail when I
was there, Comrade Ware, and you must have noticed the
difference. You had jailed Emma Cutler, an organizer for
the Agricultural and Cannery Workers Union, as a "va-

grant" three hours after she had arrived in the Valley. You
knew that the charge was false. You knew that you were
executing the terms of an illegal, hence criminal, miscar-
riage of justice. And you soon came to know the quality
of your prisoner, just as the wardens at San Quentin are

learning the quality of the seven members of the Commu-

nist Party and one member of the Workers Party who are
imprisoned there, for much longer terms.
Miss Cutler, as you told my friend Charles Malamuth,
was in some respects a "model prisoner": self-disciplined,
composed, industrious she spent much of her time sew-
ing for herself and friends. She was indeed, from all ac-
counts, one of our best people, and the most unfortunate
thing about it, from your point of view, was that her fel-
low prisoners were beginning to catch the infection of her
superior quality. In other words, she continued to be a
Communist and to teach Communism, so that in jail or
out, she seems likely to be a permanent menace to the in-
creasing criminality of the capitalist state.
You see how it works out, Comrade Ware. Eventually,
when the hour-glass reverses itself, the categories of best
320 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
and worst will have become pretty clearly defined and sep-
arated. It will then be a matter simply of releasing the best

people and incarcerating the worst; the latter not for long,
I hopeonly until it is possible to reemploy them at so-

cially serviceable tasks and reeducate them into the pattern

of a socialized and economy and cul-
relatively functional
ture.
There will be, of course, a considerable accumulation of
social debris to dispose of: turnkeys, stool pigeons, busi-
ness and financial racketeers and their middle-class snug-
gle-pups, horse-headed military people, the degenerate, un-
employable dregs of the lumpenproletariat which our dis-
eased capitalist metabolism is excreting at an accelerating
rate. Ihope you won't be in any of these categories, Com-
rade Ware, for barring a certain naive capacity for he-man
histrionism, and a certain gravely discreditable subservi-
ency to power as such, you seemed a rather decent fellow.
The chief trouble with you as I saw it, Comrade Ware,
was that you didn't know enough. For example, you were
unable to understand my role, and the conflicting hy-
potheses offered by your stool pigeons didn't help matters
at all. I was exactly what I described myself to be: a writer

employed, at the moment, by capitalist newspapers to do a

particular job of reporting. Over and above that I was a
United States citizen, holding radical political and social
views which I was fully entitled, under the law, to hold
and to express.
I was not then and am not now one of our best
people as
I have defined the phrase: my own role has thus far en-

tailed no such sacrifices, hardships, and dangers as fall to

their lot. Mine is none the less, I believe, a legitimate and
 BREAD-AND-BUTTER LETTER 321

permanently useful role. I happen to believe that a writer

owes a responsibility to the written word which he cannot
violate without stultifying himself and destroying his use-
fulness to civilization. And I am convinced that at present,
and for the immediate future, an American writer cannot
fully discharge that responsibility if he accepts either the
discipline of any existing revolutionary party or the im-
plicit bribes involved in the acceptance of most of the well-
paid literary employments offered to him under capitalism.
At various times I have attempted to aid and support
the activities of the Communist Workers Party,
Party, the
and the Socialist Party, and shall continue to do so. But
not at the sacrifice of my particular function, which is to
tell the truth as I see it. Telling the truth means, for ex-
ample, telling that the Communist Party does not always
tell the truth. It means repudiating the lie as a tactic,

whether used by capitalists, fascists, socialists, or commu-

nists of whatever faction.
Do I make myself clear, Comrade Ware? I have made
myself very clear to the Communist Party, for many of
whose members and sympathizers I have great respect, al-
though I disagree profoundly with many of their politics
and tactics. For this I have been denounced in the Com-
munist press as a "counter-revolutionary," "potential fas-
cist," etc. factional canards that no intelligent person
takes seriously, not even their party-disciplined authors.

They have not deterred me from continuing to point out

that the "ends-justify-the-means" philosophy invoked to
validate such tactics is not truly communist, but fanatical,
and highly dangerous
Jesuitical, to the building of a sound
revolutionary movement.
322 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
By this time, Comrade Ware, I imagine that you are
pretty much bewildered. You are
asking, perhaps, why
build a revolutionary movement at
all? Because the utter

bankruptcy and chaos of the capitalist economy and the

capitalist culture is, in my opinion, imminent. It is there-
fore necessary to erect the scaffolding of a revolutionary

receivership that will be strong enough and sound enough

and honest enough to take over that bankruptcy and exer-
cise sanely and creatively the power that the logic of events
will ultimately place in its hands. Be a little realistic, Com-
rade Ware. Would you have the effrontery to deny that
the capitalist economy and the capitalist state in the Im-

perial Valley is at this moment bankrupt with respect to

practically all its
pretensions of law, order, economic
health, and human decency?
Let's start with the little matter of civil liberties, guar-
anteed to us under the Constitution. After your depu-
all

ties escorted me
across the state line I headed straight for

Phoenix, Arizona, and you must have guessed why. I

wanted to talk to General Pelham D. Glassford and get
from him another copy of the report which you found in
my files and which, apparently, you failed to return after
you had ransacked them. I did get a copy of that report
made to theDepartment of Labor, the Department of Ag-
riculture and the National Labor Board, and this is what
it said:

After more than two months of observation and investiga-

tion in the Imperial Valley, it is my conviction that a group
of growers have exploited a "Communist" hysteria for the
advancement of their own interests; that they have welcomed
 BREAD-AND-BUTTER LETTER 323
labor agitation which they could brand as "red" as a means
of sustaining supremacy by mob rule, thereby preserving what
isso essential to their profits cheap labor; that they have suc-
ceeded in drawing into their conspiracy certain county of-
who have become the principal tools of their machine.
ficials

Coming from a former army officer of high rank and a

representative of the Federal government, this is strong

language. Back of it lies the personal experience of Gen-
eral Glassford and his Secretary, now Mrs. Glassford, dur-
ing their two months' stay in the Valley. Their telephone
line was tapped and the confidence that is supposed to sur-
round telegraphic communications by Western Union and
Postal Telegraph was violated. They lived in an atmos-

phere of fear and espionage. Few persons would talk; those

who did insisted that they be not quoted. Those who
wrote rarely signed their communications. Mrs. Glassford
toldme that only after they had left the Valley did she feel
able to draw a free breath this, from the assistant of a spe-
cial investigator acting with the full authority of the Fed-
eral government.
Most of the dynamite in General Glassford's report was
suppressed, Comrade Ware; ask your guide, philosopher,
and friend, Chester B. Moore, secretary of the Vegetable
Growers Protective Association, why and how it was sup-
pressed. Oh, well, don't bother. I'll tell you: it was sup-
pressed because it was a true report; because the wisdom
and statesmanship of the incorporated shipper-growers of
the Imperial Valley have only one solution for the prob-
lem of restoring peace in the Valley that solution being
the incitement and manipulation of a mob terror suf-
324 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER

ficiently violent and unchallenged by county, state or Fed-

They and you
eral authorities to extinguish all opposition.
didn't want that to be told, Comrade Ware. That was why

your crowd suppressed General Glassford's report and why

you jailed and deported me. Here, Comrade Ware, is a
condensed but substantially accurate picture of the econ-
omy and culture of that below-sea-level agricultural para-
dise of which you are the legal custodian:
The major crops in the Imperial Valley are lettuce,
cantaloupe, peas, and carrots all grown "out of season"
with respect to eastern markets, all highly perishable, all
produced on irrigated desert land lying at or below sea
level. The conditions of production are industrial rather
than agricultural in the older sense. Ninety per cent of the
crops in the Valley are grown or financed by a small group
of shipper-growers. Among the largest of these shipper-
growers, most of whom also operate in other lettuce-grow-
ing regions, including the Salinas Valley of California, the
Salt River Valley of Arizona, south Texas and even Flor-

ida, are American Fruit Growers, with 665 acres in lettuce

in the Imperial Valley, S. A. Gerrard Company with 1,200
acres, and the M. C. Wahl Company with 600 acres. It was
in the Wahl shed in El Centre that two strikers were shot
and killed by armed and deputized strikebreakers the
week before I arrived in the Valley. Through a pro-rating
agreement the lettuce acreage in the Imperial Valley,
which was approximately 30,000 acres in 1933, was reduced
for the 1934-35 season to 16,789 acres. Of this acreage only

3,510 acres are tilled by so-called "independent" growers

whose independence, incidentally, is highly qualified by
the fact that the big shipper-growers to whom most of
 BREAD-AND-BUTTER LETTER 325
them sell control the facilities for packing and shipping,
and hence can more or less set the price paid to the grow-
ers. The same situation applies, in approximately the same

degree, to the other major crops.

Labor in this industrialized agriculture divides into two
categories: the shed workers and the field or "stoop labor."
The former, in general, are 100 per cent American
fruit tramps. Many of them have a semi-permanent em-
ployee status with respect to the large shipper-growers
and move from one area to another as the crops mature.
Since the depression, however, the numbers of these migra-
tory workers have been greatly increased by all sorts of
destitute and industrial and white
dispossessed people:
collar workers from the cities, whole families of dispos-
sessed share-croppers from Oklahoma, Texas, and the deep
South.
The field workers, or "stoop labor," are chiefly Mexi-
cans. In the report of Will J. French, J. L. Leonard and
Simon J. Lubin to the National Labor Board, dated Feb.
11, 1934, itwas estimated that there were then in the Val-
ley about 15,000 Mexicans, 3,000 Filipinos and smaller
groups of Japanese, Negroes, and Hindus. Since then there
has been a considerable "repatriation" of Mexicans for
whom, because of the reduced production of lettuce and
other crops, there was no employment. But to compensate
for this there has been a fairly constant movement of Mexi-
cans across the border, as well as a steady increase in the
movement of migratories from the east into the Valley. So
that whereas there were in January, 1934, between 4,000
and 5,000 unemployed in the Valley, plus their women and
children, the number had increased rather than decreased
326 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
a year later when I was there. John R. Lestner, the deputy
labor commissioner in El Centre, estimated that whereas
there is employment for 5,000 to 7,000 stoop laborers,
there are now
in the Valley from 8,000 to 10,000 Mexicans

plus 5,000 Filipinos. In 1932 the hourly scale for stoop

labor dropped to as low as 10 cents; this year it was 25
cents, but despite the efforts of the labor commissioner to
enforce the state law, the workers continue to be chiseled
and exploited by the labor contractors who sell them at so
much a head to the growers.
The three-men-to-one job surplus of stoop labor is fully
matched by the surplus of shed workers. It was this sur-
plus, together with the strong-arm methods of the growers,
that broke the strike of lettuce packers and trimmers this

year. The shed owners simply went out on the highway

and picked up migratories, with the result that by the end
of the strike about a thousand new packers and trimmers
had been added to the labor pool.
All this labor is heavily subsidized by relief. Both for
stoop labor and shed labor the scale is so low and employ-
ment so intermittent that only at the peaks of the harvest
seasons do the workers make subsistence wages. You hear
tales of the big stakes made by
the fruit tramps when the
harvest is heavy; but the sober estimate of the U. S. De-

partment of Labor representative in the Valley was that the

family income of the average fruit tramp was under $600
a year; whereas the family income of the stoop laborers
ran under $400 a year.
As to the living conditions of both the fruit tramps
and the stoop labor, the Leonard-French-Lubin report is
admirably frank: "This report must state that we found
 BREAD-AND-BUTTER LETTER 327

filth,squalor, an entire absence of sanitation, and a crowd-

ing of human beings into totally inadequate tents or crude
structures built of boards, weeds, and anything that was
found athand to give a pitiful semblance of a home at its
worst. Words cannot describe some of the conditions we
saw." What I saw during mybrief stay in the Valley fully
confirmed this statement. During the peak of the lettuce
harvest men and some cases women, although this is
in

against the law, are worked under the frantic speed-up of

the split bench system from 4 in the morning until 10 at
night. Hence the demand of the Fruit and Vegetable
Workers Union of California for the ending of the split
bench system (a combination of piece work by the packers
and hourly wages for the trimmers which speeds up both)
and for time and a third for all work over ten hours a day,
and for the privilege of hiring a "booster" or substitute
to relieve a packer or trimmer when he or she is about to

drop in his tracks.

To complete the picture of this below-sea-level, sweated,

overpopulated, i3O-degree-Fahrenheit Eden it is only nec-

essary to add that with the exception of the banks and in-
dividualsincluding Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles
Times who own the land and lease it to the shipper-
growers, nobody has been making any money in the Valley
since 1930. The Labor Board report states that "in spite
of all economies, and with wages during 1933 as low as

i2i/ and 15 cents per hour, the shippers point out that
they have lost an average of $3,500,000 per year for the

past four years." To these losses there might well be added

the heavy relief bill paid by the Federal government which
is in effect a subsidy of the industry; also the cost of bring-
328 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
ing water into the Valley by tank car during last year's
drought (what little water there was appears to have been
preempted by Harry Chandler to irrigate the several hun-
dred thousand irrigated acres he owns south of the line in
Mexico).
Off season lettuce is grown all the way from Florida to
California. The industry has yielded huge profits in the
past, but its economics are extremely fragile and also fan-
tastically racketed. The shipper-growers have an organiza-
tionthe Western Growers Protective Association but as
far as I could learn from its Secretary, Mr. C. B. Moore, its
activities are restricted to fighting adverse legislation and
breaking strikes. Mr. Moore stated flatly that the Associa-
tion is not interested in marketing: that was left to the
individual responsibility of the grower or shipper-grower.
The result is a sort of chronic chaos; the price, set by com-
mission merchants in the eastern and middle-western mar-
from day to day. If you are a shipper-grower,
kets, varies

you load and "roll" your cars, and then attempt to divert
them while they are on the road to whatever market seems
to offer the best price at the moment. Since all or most of
the growers in all the producing areas are doing this, the
result that markets are frequently glutted, thousands
is

of tons of lettuce are spoiled and dumped; other huge

quantities of lettuce wither and blow away in the fields;

racketeers flourish. A
favorite device of the less scrupulous
commission merchants is to buy a given crop of lettuce,
for which the grower pays the cost of harvesting, trimming
and packing. He then reports that the Kansas City market
was glutted so he sent it to Chicago which was also glutted
by the time it got there, so it went to Baltimore and by
 BREAD-AND-BUTTER LETTER 329
that time it had spoiled. Maybe ithad and maybe it hadn't.
The grower loses in any case. Everybody I talked to in the
Valley agreed that the small independent grower the man
who cultivates forty acres or under practically always
loses. His condition is little better than that of the fruit

tramps and the stoop labor; which makes the suggested

remedy of subsistence homesteads as a device for anchor-
ing the floating labor seem highly questionable. Anyway,
why pick the Imperial Valley, which gets so hot in sum-
mer that everybody moves out who possibly can?

My liberal editor did a good job, Comrade Ware, in the

matter of calling attention to the stupid mistake you and
Chet Moore made in jailing me. He even brought me
back to Washington to testify before the House Labor
Committee concerning what was wrong with the Imperial
Valley. There I did my best, Comrade Ware, to multiply
your headaches and those of Mr. Moore. I demanded, first,
that there be a Congressional investigation of the break-
down of law and order in the Imperial Valley; second, that
agricultural labor be included in the provisions of the
Wagner Labor Bill then pending.
Of course, neither of these things was done. It was not
in the cards that they be done, although my recommenda-
tions were just, needful, and even crucial if the administra-
tion intended to make good on its liberal make-believe
with respect to labor. It did not so intend. It had already
proved repeatedly that it did not so intend, so I wasn't
much surprised. I was sure that if any serious attempt had
been made to include agricultural labor in the provisions
of theWagner Bill, it would have been the signal for a
330 CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE Is BETTER
revolt by almost the whole Southern Democratic delega-
tion in Congress, led probably by Senator Robinson of
Arkansas. Only a few stalwart liberals like Maverick of
Texas would have dared to buck that tide.
Chet Moore knows his politics, so he probably wasn't
much worried by my efforts in Washington. He had al-
ready proved what he could do when he was instrumental
in procuring a thoroughly shameless whitewash of the Im-

perial Valley labor situation signed by the Dean of the

College of Agriculture of the University of California.
This report, made by a special investigating committee
appointed at the request of the California State Board of
Agriculture, the California Farm Bureau Federation, and
the Agricultural Department of the California State
Chamber of Commerce, was designed to offset the un-
palatably accurate and liberal report of the Leonard- Lubin
committee and that of General Glassford already referred
to.

You know better than I do, Comrade Ware, what is in

the cards for the Imperial Valley, and for California. Not
peace, certainly. Even Europe has better chance of it, it
seems to me, as things are going. Certainly it is not pos-
sible to reorganize and sanitate California's agricultural
economy, without reorganizing the total national economy,
and that, of course, is not immediately in prospect.
Well, happy days, Comrade Ware! Give my regards to
my jail-mates: the Mexicans waiting for deportation, the
out-of-luck Indians, the border gambler with his fine brow,
hard eyes and bitter tongue in a decent society and with
half a chance he'd have been an able, useful citizen; also
the fine kid from Martha's Vineyard, a descendant of one
 BREAD-AND-BUTTER LETTER 331

of its colonial governors, who had hitch-hiked across the

continent looking for a job so that he could marry his girl.

He was proud that he hadn't scabbed in that lettuce strike,
and I hope his girl has sense enough to feel the same way
about it.
Maybe he and the others are out by this time; I

hope so. However, the kangaroo court always needs

money, so here's a couple of bucks for them part of what
the paper paid me for bawling you out. My college fra-
ternity justdunned me for a contribution, but I think the
best people whom I met in El Centre need it more. Keep
your shirt on and try talking back to Chet Moore the next
time he starts crowding you. He's scared too, and bluffing
more than you think.
Yours sincerely,
JAMES RORTY.
HEADING HOME
 CALLIE LONG'S BOY HUEY

LONG isdead, slain by an assassin's bullet, and

HUEY his "Share the Wealth" Movement is no longer a
serious threat to the Roosevelt administration. When I

was in New Orleans and Baton Rouge talking to some of

the third-rate politicians who were fighting Long, I more
than once felt my hair rising with the realization that

such a denouement was more probable than otherwise. It

was the one thing needed to prove the political and social
bankruptcy of the state. It came, a shot in the dark; and
when the echoes subsided, Louisiana was darker, if any-
thing, than before that shot was fired.
Neither in speech nor in written message did the assas-
sin, a young, politically unknown medical specialist, at-

tempt to explain or justify his act and the fusillade of

Long's bodyguard silenced him forever. That it was the

outcome of a conspiracy by Long's political enemies seems
probable, although not
this has yet been proved. That it
will be followed by the political, economic, and social re-

generation of the state seems utterly unlikely.

The Long machine will struggle desperately to maintain
itself.
Lacking comparable leaders Long, like Mussolini,
was always quick to suppress potential rivals within his
own organization it will probably crack up. Certainly,
Jim Farley's task of bringing Louisiana back into the reg-
335
336 HEADING HOME
ular Democratic fold will be greatly facilitated. If I were
a Louisianan, I would remark sourly at this point, "So
what?" Everything that was bad in Louisiana before Long,
and perhaps a little worse because of Long, is still there.
And everything that was not there before or during the
Long regime specifically an honest and developed labor
movement and moderately honest and effective liberal and
radical political groupings is still absent. Under the cir-
cumstances, the best one can do is to
pray that the tend-
ency to substitute gunfire for honesty and brains doesn't
plunge Louisiana again into the horrors of the post-Civil
War reconstruction period.
Concerning Long himself, I find little to change in

what Iwrote when he was still alive.

One would have to search hard to find something kindly
to say about this dead. One might take refuge in moments

undeniably charming. Certainly he was a vivid, gifted, and

fascinating personality. But why will it be so difficult for
his biographers to write anything interesting and moving
about him, whereas it would be easy to write a good vol-
ume about any one of a hundred relatively obscure artists,

scientists, honest radicals, or plain citizens?

Part oi the explanation is that Long never attained
moral or spiritual maturity one even doubts that he had
it in him. He was pure power-politician. He said and did

almost nothing that did not contribute directly or indi-

rectly to the attainment and consolidation of his power.
Power is not interesting or moving in and of itself. And
when its possessor and manipulator is otherwise without
human dignity, sincerity, or grace, there is little to say
about him after he is dead.
 CALLIE LONG'S BOY HUEY 337

Requiescat. the picture of Huey Long and his

Here is

state, much as I put it together in Louisiana when Huey

was at the peak of his power.

In New Orleans I talked to an ancient native son of

Louisiana, who put
substantially this way:
it

About ten years ago a Winn Parish boy Gallic Long's

boy Huey, the one who always said he was going to be
President some day came to the big town and put on
an act and then another act, until by now doggone if
Huey about the biggest show in America.
ain't just
It was indeed a continuous performance, in Washing-

ton, in New Orleans, in Baton Rouge. I stood in the lobby

of the Hotel Roosevelt in New Orleans and watched the
curtain rise on one of the kaleidoscopic scenes of the Huey
Long drama. Suddenly the doormen stood at attention.
The little groups of pink-jowled politicians interrupted
their side-of-the-mouth intimacies; the carp-faced tourists
stood goggle-eyed, with open mouths. Preceded and fol-
lowed by his bodyguards, a swaggering, red-faced figure
strode through the revolving doors and into the elevator.
The Senator from Louisiana. The Kingfish. In the big
on the fifth floor I knew that Huey and his hench-
suite
men would be busy until long after midnight. A crisis.
Roosevelt, to use the phrase of one of Huey's journalistic
enemies, had "stopped playing sissy politics." The big guns
of federal patronage, to be given or withheld, were being
unlimbered, at the same time that a battalion of Federal
income-tax investigators was sharpshooting at Huey's lieu-
tenants.
338 HEADING HOME
Baton Rouge, the brand-new, beautifully landscaped
campus of Huey Long's personal university, where, to cele-
brate seventy-fifth anniversary, Huey is staging the big-
its

gest educational show on earth. Scientists, savants, social

workers, hospitably intermingled with poets, Rotarians,
Lions, and Glenn Frank, throng the campus. It is the big
day, the reception to the Italian Ambassador. Ta-ta-ra!
The cadets are marching in blue and gold, a seven-foot
drum major strutting at the head of the band. As they
pass the reviewing stand, where are grouped the Ambas-
sador, the Governor, Huey, and other notables, the band
plays "Giovanezza," the marching song of Mussolini's
blackshirts.
The newsreel cameraman grinds furiously. A good show.
"The only thing wrong with it," mutters John Gould
Fletcher, standing with outthrust jaw beside me, "is that
flag there. It ought to be the Confederate flag."
I stared at him. Fletcher and I, along with Allen Tate,

Caroline Gordon, John Peal Bishop, and others of the

Fugitive-Agrarian group of Southern writers, the editors
of various Southern literary magazines, and such imported
notables as Ford Madox Ford, were attending the South-
ern Writers Conference, one of the side shows of Huey's
multi-ringed educational circus.
One of the first things we outlanders learned was that
the Civil War is not over yet. When Southerners speak
of the last war, they mean the Civil War. These Southern
writers, it seemed to me, represented what the South never

quite was nearly a century ago and what they would ob-
stinately like it to become, in spite of the fact that obvi-

ously and irreparably it has become something quite dif-

 CALLIE LONG'S BOY HUEY 339
ferent.For a couple of decades since the Great War, South-
ern culture has been thumbing the highways of politics,
sometimes deprecatingly, and again belligerently ("I Take
My Stand") but always pretty much in vain.
without significance that the first politician to give
Is it

Southern Culture a lift was, first, the son of an up-state

hillbilly,second, the quasi-Fascist dictator of the state,
and, third, a candidate for the Presidency on a fake Share
the Wealth program which was either Fascist or nothing?
Just what kind of a lift did Huey give Southern Cul-
ture and by what methods?

Huey spoke at the dinner to the Italian Ambassador,

following the review of Louisiana State's R.O.T.C. Said
Huey:
It seems that many have questioned whether I have inter-
fered with the operation of the University, and Dr. Smith [the
President of Louisiana State] has said that I haven't. I am
slandered by the President when he says that I did not inter-
fere. I want to assert that as a matter of fact I have interfered.
I interfered when they were reducing salaries all over the
United States and I stepped in and prevented the reductions
at L.S.U. . . . We started out when I became Governor
with about $650,000 a year. The assessment of the state then
was about $1,700,000,000, and the half-mill tax was yielding
then about $800,000 a year, but that tax would not be giving
but about $650,000 a year. ... It is now getting about
$2,700,000 a year. I interfered and gave them some more
money. I am going to quit this interference at the first op-
portunity and give the job to Dr. Smith and let him and the
others stay up nights with legislators, getting the additional
votes necessary to put the legislation over.
340 HEADING HOME
We are celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Uni-
versity. I have had considerable to do with only the last five
years and I am going to give some advice to the colleges. . . .

You will find that you cannot do without politicians. They

are a necessary evil in this dayand time. You may not like
getting money from one source and spending it for another.
But the thing for the school people to do is that if the poli-
ticians are going to steal make them steal for the schools.

Note the rigorous logic of the Senator's point of view.

Public education is a matter of using political means to
direct public money into educational channels. Politics is

larceny. The job of the educators is to aid and abet polit-

ical larceny.

Interestingly enough, the visiting educators rather ad-

mired Huey's bold and forthright tactics. They even en-
joyed the characteristic sadism with which Huey rubbed
the noses of the servants of culture into the brutal realities
of spoils politics. They liked Huey better than Glenn
Frank, who came and went the evening before, giving us
his familiar version of the "Daring Young Man on the

Flying Trapeze." Mr. Frank started in by approving as

practical and necessary the coordination of education with
the state power; he concluded by making equally fierce

faces, first at the politicians who dared to infringe upon

the integrity and freedom of educators and second at edu-
cators who were so recreant to the trust reposed in them

by the state as to "propagandize" their classes, instead of

jumping them through the conventional hoops of "ob-

jectivity."
Clearly, the Senator from Louisiana had no monopoly
of demagoguery. But I was struck by the relatively su-
 CALLIE LONG'S BOY HUEY 341

perior astuteness and logic of Huey's performance. What

he said about Louisiana State University was approxi-
mately true. But what the Senator did not say is also true:
that Louisiana's educational picture as a whole is dark
and growing darker. Free schoolbooks, yes. But during
the Long regime the salaries of teachers in the elementary
and secondary schools were repeatedly cut. The average
for white teachers in the elementary schools last year was

$621.95; for Negro teachers $218.97 both figures repre-

senting substantial reductions from the preceding year.
Moreover, unpaid salaries amounted to a million and a
quarter, double the total outstanding the year before.
Why did Louisiana State University occupy its preferred
position? Because it was not only a good showpiece but a
useful instrument for fascist "coordination" of the middle
class.Ninety per cent of the L.S.U. students were for
Long they had better be if they expected to get the jobs
which are liberally distributed to right-minded students.
Moreover, the more energetic and loyal of these students
were encouraged to take graduate work in other univer-
sities and there start Share the Wealth clubs.
According to the officials some of
of Louisiana State,
whom and their teachers
profess strong liberal views, they
enjoy untrammeled academic freedom. Did not George
Counts, of Columbia, make the principal address on the
occasion when L.S.U. awarded honorary degrees to the
Italian Ambassador and others? He did, and it was an ex-
cellent, forthright, radical speech, lacking only specific
mention of Huey Long, what he had done to the State
of Louisiana, and what he proposed to do to the nation.
The public utterances and writings of the teachers in
342 HEADING HOME
L.S.U.'s social-science department exhibit similar discreet
omissions.
As with education, so with Huey's sham battles with
big business and his sham support of labor. As clearly
shown by Oliver Carlson in his series in the New York
Post, Huey's theory and practice were severely practical
with respect to both issues. "Socking big business" made
excellent political capital for his debut. But, points out
Carlson:

in Shreveport he at one and the same time secured a small

reduction in the electric-light rate and allowed a 38 per
cent increase in the gas rate. The same company, South-
western Gas and Electric Company, operated both services and
lost nothing by the deal. Moreover, Southwestern Gas and
Electric contributed not less than $10,000 to Huey's campaign

expenses in the 1924 gubernatorial contest, according to

Long's own campaign manager.

Undoubtedly Huey's initial tub thumping caused per-

turbation in the breasts of the Louisiana magnates, but
business is quick to recognize a practical man in politics.
Otherwise, why were Carlson, Carleton Beals, and I un-
able to induce a single representative of big business to
make a forthright attack upon Long?
I did induce one corporation lawyer, a well-known and
irreconcilable enemy of Long, to talk a little but strictly
not for quotation. What has happened, he said, is that
today New Orleans business is largely owned by holding
companies or large industrial corporations with headquar-
ters in New York or Chicago; this trend toward absentee

ownership has been accelerated during the depression.

 CALLIE LONG'S BOY HUEY 343

Hence, many of the important executives are not native

owner-managers but satraps sent down from the North to
manage a unit of a national or international enterprise.
In the old days, the native business men would buy politi-
cal insurance by contributing to the campaign funds of

relatively honest candidates. Today, the imported satraps

are more likely to negotiate an offensive political ma-
neuver: they pay for the election of a crook and bargain
for specific advantages.

Some time back, when a delegation of union leaders

asked Huey to require his road contractors to pay the
prevailing scale of wages, he replied angrily: "You fellows
should be glad to get a job at any wage and of any kind,
without bothering about wage scales."
This is the logic of capitalism in its present period of
decline. It is the logic of fascism, of which Huey was
almost the only definitive and formidable exponent in
America. His showmanship, his back-of-the-scenes trading
with the satraps of big business, his ruthless purchase and
coercion of votes all are understandable in the terms of
this logic.

Yet, put it all together, and it does not constitute a true

or sufficient explanation of Huey Long and his following.
A formidable fascist movement cannot be organized and
led by a super-robot demagogue who functions merely
as a logicalcog in an evolving politico-economic mechan-
ism. The Senator from Louisiana was not pure charlatan
the ablest charlatans are never pure, and they always ex-
press something beside themselves and their personal wills
to power. Mussolini, in the period of his struggle for
344 HEADING HOME
power, had the support of Italian finance and industry,
who saw in him the instrument of their salvation; but his

appeal was to the national memory a drive to rehabilitate

the grandeur that was Rome. Hitler had the support of
Thyssen and others; but his appeal was to the hatred and
resentment of a conquered and humiliated people his
slogan the repudiation of the War guilt and of the Treaty
of Versailles.
Huey Long had the support of an influential section
of Louisiana business (Oliver Carlson estimated that 50
per cent of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce were
for him), but his appeal was to the century-old hatred of
the Southern hillbillies for the plantation owners and for
the new hierarchy of big business centering in New Or-
leans. To them and to the middle classes of the cities and
towns, Huey posed the rhetorical question: "Little man,
what now?" and then answered for them: "Every man a

king!"

South of Baton Rouge in the not-so-idyllic "Evangeline

country" I found the Cajun trappers fighting fitfully to
establish a union that would give them some protection

against the extortion of the landowners and the fur traders

among the chief of whom was one of Huey's principal
political lieutenants. Then, circling north through the rice
plantations on one of which, owned by a Long supporter,
Huey arranged to have convict labor employed, despite
the state law specifically prohibiting it I came at last to
the Free State of Winn, otherwise known as Winnfield
Parish, where Huey Long was born and where his eighty-
three-year-old father still lives.
 CALLIE LONG'S BOY HUEY 345
He
dwells on the edge of the town of Winnfield, county
seat of Winn Parish, in a new, single-story bungalow at
the end of a lane, about a hundred yards from the site of
the log cabin in which Huey was He and Huey's
born.
brother, Earl, received me
cordially and invited me to
share their supper of cheese, crackers, and beer.
It was scarcely an interview. Huey Long, Sr., had some-

thing to say, not for his son but for himself a simple,
violent person, still violent at eighty-three, the big-boned,
six-foot frame erect and powerful, the voice roaring. This
is what he said:
"Didn't Abraham Lincolnfree the niggers and not give
the planters a dime? Why shouldn't Huey take the money
away from the rich and still leave 'em plenty? Abe Lincoln
freed the niggers without price. Why shouldn't the white
slavesbe freed, and their masters left all they can use?"
Hepaused. "Maybe you're surprised to hear talk like
that. Well, it was just such talk that my boy was raised
under and that I was raised under. My father and my
mother favored the Union. Why not? They didn't have
slaves. They didn't even have decent land. The rich folks
had all the good land and all the slaves why, their women
didn't even comb their own hair. They'd sooner speak to
a nigger than to a poor white. They tried to pass a law
saying that only them as owned land could vote. And,
when the war come, the man that owned ten slaves didn't
have to fight."
The dropped mouth of the old man writhed, contorted,
spat out this ancient, still-vivid hatred. Suddenly he col-

lapsed in his chair.

"There wants to be a revolution, I tell you. I seen this
346 HEADING HOME
domination of capital, seen it for seventy years. What do
these rich folks care for the poor man? They care nothing
not for his pain, his sickness, nor his death. And now
they're talking again about keeping the poor folks from
voting that same talk. I say there wants to be a revolu-
tion."
The effort had exhausted him. "Son, I'm an old man,"
he rumbled. "But I'm not too old. I know what I'm
sayin*. . Take this down, son. Whatever I say is said
. .

conscientious. I hope what Huey says is conscientious and

I kind of think it is."

The old man dozed in his chair. Earl Long and I

munched crackers and drank beer. Would Huey run for
the presidency in 1936? I asked. Earl thought he would.
A little later I unlatched the gate of Huey Long, Sr.'s,

cow pasture and walked down the lane. I had found what
I was looking for the sociological springboard of Huey's
rise to fame and power. As with Mussolini and Hitler, it
was a war. But not the Great War. Just as my Southern
friends had been telling me, it was the Civil War.

Twenty miles back in the hills from Winnfield is the

village of Sikes: a filling station, two stores, an ancient,
unused hotel, sagging on its foundations, a one-room shack
that serves as office for the village doctor. All the old and

middle-aged people in and around Sikes knew Huey;

some of them are kin to the Longs, who once owned a
hundred-sixty-acre farm in the vicinity. Huey and his
brother Earl worked this farm: their father would take
them out of school to help make a corn crop.
Most of the corn and cotton farmers owned their own
land then. Today the lumber and paper companies and
 CALLIE LONG'S BOY HUEY 347

the banks own 85 per cent of it; of the remaining 15 per

cent, perhaps one tenth is from mortgages. Until
free

comparatively recent years, these hills were heavily for-

ested with pine. The farmers would clear an acre or two,
cultivate it as long as it remained fertile, then let it go
for taxes. In the early days, the forest was the foe of the
homesteader; the timber was considered valueless, and
lumber companies acquired big tracts for a pittance.
The hill farmers were poor then, and life was primitive.
The village doctor, who is now sixty-one, told me that he
was fourteen years old before he saw a mule: it was oxen
then that dragged the homemade carts, loaded with a few
bales of cotton, over unspeakable roads to the nearest ship-

ping point.
The hill farmers are poorer than ever now: they have
lost their land and most of them are either renters or
share-croppers. And, since erosion a natural process which
Secretary of Agriculture Hyde once described as the "fric-
tion of the mortgage on the farmer's pocketbook" has
carried most of the top-soil down the river, the hill farms

produce less than half as much cotton to the acre as the

good land of the Yazoo Delta. The hill farmers are poor:
no paint on the two- and three-room shacks; often no steps
on which to mount the sagging porch; no radio; soapboxes
instead of chairs; corn pone and fat meat to eat yes, and

potlikker, of course. And most of them were for Huey

Long, regardless.
Regardless of what?
Regardless of the fact that Winnfield Parish the Free
State ofWinn, during the Civil War has been for nearly
a hundred years one of the most radical spots on the
348 HEADING HOME
whole map of the South. Regardless of the fact that many
of the ex-Populists and ex-socialists who voted for Huey
were privately skeptical of his sincerity and of the cogency
of his Share the Wealth program. They were skeptical but,
like Huey's own father, they hoped or "kind of thought"
that he was conscientious.

History books are deplorably lacking in significant

minutiae. Most of those I consulted had nothing to say
about Winn Parish. But the memories of the old-timers
are extraordinarily fresh: they check with each other; and
I am confident that the following sketch is substantially
accurate.
When the Civil War broke out, Winn Parish sent a
delegate, David Pierson, to the convention called to organ-
ize the Confederacy. He was instructed to vote against se-

cession; he did vote against secession; and, thereafter, al-

though the power of the planters swept Louisiana into the

Confederacy, Winnfield Parish was popularly referred to
as the Free State of Winn.
What did they want, these abolitionist, antisecessionist,
Unionist yeoman farmers of the Free State of Winn? In
the words of Huey Long's own father, they wanted to "get
the niggers off our necks." There were few Negroes in
Winn Parish then and there are few Negroes now. But
there were Negro slaves in the delta lands of Mississippi,
Alabama, Louisiana, whence these poor whites emigrated,
and it was the competition of slave labor that forced them
back into the hills. There are Negroes, hundreds of thou-
sands of them, in the Yazoo Delta today, working as share-
croppers under conditions which are the practical equiva-
lent of slavery and forcing out the white share-croppers.
 CALLIE LONG'S BOY HUEY 349
When drove through the Delta, the poor whites I picked
I

up along the road told me: "It's hard for a white man to
get a home these days. The owners would rather have the
niggers."
Perhaps the ultimate working out of this conflict is
expressed in the attempt of the Southern Tenant Farmers
Union, in Arkansas and elsewhere, to organize white and
black share-croppers together. To "get the niggers off their
backs," the white share-croppers are obliged to make com-
mon cause with the Negro share-croppers on terms of eco-
nomic equality, which means ultimately, of course, social

equality.
Both before and after the Civil War, the hill farmers
of Winn Parish proposed a different solution. They
wanted the Negroes colonized on reservations, like the
Indians. But the story of this struggle can best be told in
the words of the octogenarians who lived through most
of it. To them the past is ever present in the contemporary
conflicts; there is no break in the historical continuity;

they are still fighting, and never so blindly as today.

There is a side road out of Sikes that leads for ten miles

through cutover country, becoming progressively worse.

When it became totally
impassable, I left my car and fol-
lowed a rough wagon trail nearly a mile through the
ragged second growth of birch and oak. At the end of the
trail was a three-room cabin, and in the cabin a bright-

eyed ancient of ninety-one, sitting bent over his fireplace.

His whiskers were white and Jovian, but his hair, like
that of his eighty-seven-year-old brother, Uncle Percy
Smith, whom I had seen in Sikes, showed scarcely a trace
350 HEADING HOME
of gray. These two were the wheel horses of the Socialist

Party in Winn Parish, which in 1908, when Eugene Debs

spoke in Winnfield, elected better than half the Parish
I wanted the old man to talk about Huey, but
officials.

J. P.Smith was not a Long man, although Huey's grand-

mother was his first cousin.
"I'm a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. But we can't put it in
soon enough to save the nation. Share the Wealth won't
do enough soon enough. We're done. There's been a war
after every big panic except one. I don't believe it will
make much difference whether we elect a Democrat or a

Republican president. We'll go into a war anyway, right

after the next presidential election. Son, you say you've
been around over the country. Don't you agree with me?"
I admitted a similar apprehension, while, as became my

youth, I evaded the responsibilities of the prophet. The

old man pondered and poked his meager fire. When he
spoke again, it was the older memories, the ancient hatreds
that flared in him.

"They call it the Civil War. I call it the most degrading-

est thing that ever happened to a nation. When they came
to conscript us, my brother, J. W. Smith, said to me: 'I'll
lie in the woods till the moss grows over my back before
'
I fight for the other man's niggers.'
I had heard the phrase before from other ancients. If
their memories are accurate, about half the able-bodied
males of Winn Parish "took refuge in the arms of General
Green" rather than fight in the Confederate army. In other
words, they took to the woods, where the Confederate
cavalry hunted them and shot them down like wild shote.
 CALLIE LONG'S BOY HUEY 351

Some of them, like J. W. Smith, who was killed at Vicks-

burg, enlisted in the Union army.

After the War, Winn Parish joined with the Southern
planters to throw out the carpetbaggers.
But again they
were tricked and baffled. The Negroes weren't colonized
like the Indians the planters still held the whip hand. So,

twenty years later, when Charles Vincent organized Winn

Parish for the Populists, the old slogan was still to the
fore: "Get the niggers off our necks." In 1892 or there-

abouts, Winn Parish elected a full Populist ticket. Gradu-

ally this tide receded; but about ten years later the Social-
ist Party elected nearly half the police jurors and school-

board members for Winn Parish.

Where was the Long family in this history? I collected
various legends, none of them scandalous or even dis-
creditable, although the Senator made no use of them in
his autobiography, Every Man
a King.
So far as I could make out, the talent and force of the

Long family it is
genuine; all of Huey's five brothers
and sisters are clever and more or less successful people-
are derived chiefly from the female side.
Huey's grandmother, the mother of Huey Long, Sr.,
was a Lee, whose people came to Winnfield Parish from
Virginia in 1836. The old-timers remember her as a "very
determined woman." It seems that her husband, John
Long, who was, incidentally, a Unionist, shared the liking
ofmany another leading citizen for gambling and liquor.
But Mary Long was the leading woman Baptist of Winn-
field. She led the fight to vote
liquor out of Winnfield
Parish and won it by a spectacular and well-remembered
352 HEADING HOME
campaign which included parading the town, waving a
bloody bridle. The blood, she declaimed, was from her
husband's hands, cut while he was drunk. In the words of
one of the old-timers, "That old lady and her gang
whooped and hollered at the polls until a man could
scarcely think, let alone vote right." John Long seems to
have been philosophic. After the election he is reported to
have commented admiringly: "Doggone if Mary ain't beat
me out of my liquor."
But concerning the Senator's mother, Caledonia
it is

Tyson Long, that the people of the Parish speak with un-
qualified admiration. "A bright woman," they say, "a
noble woman, very religious and very ambitious for her
children." Many is the time they saw her driving Huey
end of a peach-tree sprout.
to school at the

Huey was a smart and enterprising boy it is true, as

recounted in his autobiography, that twice in his early
'teens he ran away from home. Was he a leader of the

boys? Yes, in a way. "If Huey couldn't pitch, he wouldn't

play." A braggart, it
appears, but not good in a fight.
"Huey would always run like a turkey." All over Louisi-
ana I heard that phrase. But in Winn Parish, used to

describe Huey's behavior as a boy, it acquired a special

significance. Perhaps it was true, I reflected, that Huey's

well-known aversion to physical combat had an early and
more or less neurotic basis.

The office of the country doctor was empty. On the

wall Isaw the diploma of an excellent medical college;

near it was a scroll of neatly engraved verses:
 CALLIE LONG'S BOY HUEY 353
I stick to those who stick to me,
All others need not bother me.
Altho of patients I've no lack
It takes the cash to run this shack.
If I'm to be your doctor still

You must keep paid up on your bill.

Perhaps because of the failure of his patients to observe

this injunction, I found the doctor putting in a corn crop.
After some persuasion, he consented to talk to me. Did
he know the Longs? Yes, he was born in Winnfield Parish,
and had practiced there for forty years. Was he for Huey?
The doctor said, "Whoa," to his mule, spat, and re-
garded me
somberly. "Son," he said, "did you ever take
a good look at Huey? Did you ever even take a good look
at a mule? A
mule with a Roman nose is no good; any
farmer with any sense knows he's no good. He's just high-
strung and he'll never be any good."
With which homespun preliminary, this country doc-
tor, who had lived and worked wholly outside the currents
of modern psychiatry and psychoanalysis as practiced in
the great cities, proceeded to give me a cogent and rather

convincing analysis of Huey's physical and psychological

characteristics, including detailed comparisons with Hit-
ler and Mussolini. A
twisted psychological type, he
thought, with a power fixation dating from boyhood-
even then he always insisted he would be President some
day. Physical cowardice balanced by malice and vindictive-
ness. Avolcanic flow of neurotic energy but he might
blow up at any minute.
I
quoted the judgment of a Southern man of letters a
352 HEADING HOME
campaign which included parading the town, waving a
bloody bridle. The blood, she declaimed, was from her
husband's hands, cut while he was drunk. In the words of
one of the old-timers, "That old lady and her gang
whooped and hollered at the polls until a man could
scarcely think, let alone vote right." John Long seems to
have been philosophic. After the election he is reported to
have commented admiringly: "Doggone if Mary ain't beat
me out of my liquor."
But concerning the Senator's mother, Caledonia
it is

Tyson Long, that the people of the Parish speak with un-
qualified admiration. "A bright woman," they say, "a
noble woman, very religious and very ambitious for her
children." Many is the time they saw her driving Huey
to school at the end of a peach-tree sprout.
Huey was a smart and enterprising boy it is true, as
recounted in his autobiography, that twice in his early
'teens he ran away from home. Was he a leader of the

boys? Yes, in a way. "If Huey couldn't pitch, he wouldn't

play." A braggart, it appears, but not good in a fight.
"Huey would always run like a turkey." All over Louisi-
ana I heard that phrase. But in Winn Parish, used to
describe Huey's behavior as a boy, it
acquired a special
significance. Perhaps it was true, I reflected, that Huey's
well-known aversion to physical combat had an early and
more or less neurotic basis.

The officeof the country doctor was empty. On the

wall I saw the diploma of an excellent medical college;
near it was a scroll of neatly engraved verses:
 CALLIE LONG'S BOY HUEY 353
I stick to those who stick to me,
All others need not bother me.
Altho of patients I've no lack
It takes the cash to run this shack.
If I'm to be your doctor still

You must keep paid up on your bill.

Perhaps because of the failure of his patients to observe

this injunction, I found the doctor putting in a corn crop.
After some persuasion, he consented to talk to me. Did
he know the Longs? Yes, he was born in Winnfield Parish,
and had practiced there for forty years. Was he for Huey?
The doctor said, "Whoa," to his mule, spat, and re-
garded me somberly. "Son," he said, "did you ever take
a good look at Huey? Did you ever even take a good look
at a mule? A mule with a Roman nose is no good; any
farmer with any sense knows he's no good. He's just high-
strung and he'll never be any good."
With which homespun preliminary, this country doc-
tor, who had lived and worked wholly outside the currents
of modern psychiatry and psychoanalysis as practiced in
the great cities, proceeded to give me a cogent and rather

convincing analysis of Huey's physical and psychological

characteristics, including detailed comparisons with Hit-
ler and Mussolini. A twisted psychological type, he
thought, with a power fixation dating from boyhood-
even then he always insisted he would be President some
day. Physical cowardice balanced by malice and vindictive-
ness. A volcanic flow of neurotic energy but he might
blow up at any minute.
I
quoted the judgment of a Southern man of letters a
354 HEADING HOME
Catholic whom I had interviewed in New Orleans: "He
has all the attributes of the mind of Satan
anger, pride,
malice, vengefulness, lust."
The doctor snorted and brushed the ecclesiastical ad-
Long was a fine woman, but Gallic
jectives aside. Gallic
Long's boy Huey was just a bad animal hopelessly off
center and not to be trusted. With which the doctor bade
me good day and returned to his plowing.
A few miles out of Sikes I passed Mineral Springs, where,
in the Baptist Church and schoolhouse, Huey Long had
debated socialism with Uncle Percy Smith, J. P. Lucas,
and Little John Peters. Huey was in his 'teens then but
already an aspiring orator. He took the democratic side of
the debate, being teamed with Harley B. Bozeman, later
one of his chief political opponents in Winnfield Parish.
Huey lost that debate the crowd was all for socialism.
Now, however, the hill farmers were swinging to Huey.
The towns too.
In Winnfield one of the leading lawyers assured me that
Huey would win the next primaries by a hundred-thou-
sand majority. He was a Long man now. He hadn't always
been. He had competed with Huey when the latter first
started practicing law in Winnfield. Within two years

Huey had grabbed the lion's share of the business away

from the veterans. No, Huey hadn't been ethical. He
hadn't waited for business to come He had gone
to him.
out and hustled for it. But you had hand it to him.
to

Everything they said was impossible Huey had done. Lou-

isiana had never before produced a politician who could
touch him.
Driving north into the Yazoo Delta, I tried to put to-
 CALLIE LONG'S BOY HUEY 355

gether what I had learned about Gallic Long's boy Huey.

Unquestionably the lawyer was right: he was the ablest,
the most formidable politician the South has produced
since the Civil War also the most ruthless. The doctor, I
felt, was also right. Fragments of Huey's speeches occurred
to me. What had he said when, after some minor political

vanquished and chastened opponent sat on the

victory, his
platform with him? "There sits B I bought him the .

way you buy a sack of potatoes." If that isn't sadism, what

is?

Again: "It is not true that I coerced Shreveport into

accepting free schoolbooks and an airport. I stomped 'em
into it."

What an ironic consummation that the authentic, cen-

tury-old revolt of the Southern hill farmers, first abolition-
ist, then Populist, then socialist, should spawn this neu-
rotically galvanized superpolitician, this frail-ferocious po-
tential dictator of the United States!
Yet how logical, how almost inevitable, after all. As
Hamilton Basso has shown, Huey Long was not the first
of his kind to arise in the South; he was merely the most
forceful, the most imaginative, the most daring, the ablest.
The tools to him who can use them.
Who can say, contemplating the career of Huey Long,
that he did not prove himself adept at manipulating the
materials of the current economic and political situation?
The crowd, the vast American crowd, with its literate
moronism, simple its faiths, its
primitive greeds, latent its

fears and hatreds, its worship of success, of the thing done,

no matter what or how; the dilemma of big business, fac-
ing the accelerating anarchic chaos of its obsolete institu-
356 HEADING HOME
and processes needing more and more
tions, legalities,

urgently someone to pour the strong liquor of dema-

goguery that will keep the crowd still hoping but still
fooled and frustrated.
These were the times and these were the needs that
bred Huey P. Long, Jr., born with hatred in his bones
and spurred by the fear which is hatred's other face; Huey
Long, the man of
many voices, the lawyer among lawyers,
the hillbilly among hillbillies, the business man among
business men, above all, the politician among politicians,
wanting power normal man wants bread or sex, brutal
as a
in victory, crafty and dangerous in defeat.

Huey Long is dead. Of him it might be said that he

introduced a new kind of demagogy and occasioned a new
type of assassination in American politics. Both are omi-
nous portents. The society is over-ripe and the New Deal
has done nothing to arrest its decay. Effects follow causes.
Huey will have imitators, successors, in Louisiana and in
the nation.
 3O
ALL QUIET ON THE SOUTHERN FRONT

Poinsett County, Arkansas, I encountered another

IN sheriff, A. C. Dubard. He was courteous and mild-
spoken, and he did not arrest me, perhaps because I stayed
only about seven hours in the county. Everything was
quiet in Poinsett County, Sheriff Dubard assured me; if
only everybody, especially newspapermen, would say that
everything was quiet, everything would be quiet, he was
sure.
As a matter of fact, at that particular moment, every-
thing was quiet. The cotton share-croppers, both white
and Negro, were quietly continuing to organize, in spite
of the fact that the active members of the Southern Tenant
Farmers Union were quietly being kicked off the land;
most of the leaders were already exiled in Memphis, where
I had talked to them. The others were
quietly being told
to leave, so they said, on pain of sudden death.
They told
me that things were also pretty quiet in the adjoining
county of Mississippi, where W. B. Webb, one of the
union organizers, was sitting quietly in his cabin waiting
for a visit from the night-riders. The
share-croppers are
indescribably poor, and Mr. Webb had only one shell for
his shot-gun. But he was quietly expecting to be obliged
to use it. Quietly, and without much comment, the union

organizers had shown me a mimeographed statement de-

357
358 HEADING HOME
tailingsome twenty- three acts of "tyranny and terror"
committed against men, women and children of the South-
ern Tenant Farmers Union during the preceding six
months.
After leaving Sheriff Dubard, I stopped along the road
to talk to two leaders of one of the white locals of the
union. It was a typical share-cropper's cabin; three rooms,
a sagging porch, a hard-baked, shrubless, flowerless yard;
back of the house, men and mules were plowing a square
mile of flat cotton land, recently stumped, and highly

productive.
Yes, the local was still meeting, they said, at a gin house
down the road. Weren't they afraid of being shot up by

night-riders? (After one such raid, 130 bullet holes were

counted in the house of one of the union leaders.) No,
they weren't afraid; they were going to hold a meeting
the following night. Didn't they expect to be raided?
"
One looked at the other. 'Tain't likely," he said.
Then,
seeing my
skepticism, he added quietly: "We got guns."
In Marked Tree, C. T. Carpenter, the local attorney
for the union, was sitting quietly in his office, having let
it be known that if the recent visit of armed night-riders
to his home were repeated, he too would be armed and
prepared to defend himself.
Mr. Carpenter is a former minister of the Gospel, and
has taught a men's Bible class in Marked Tree for twenty
years. He is also a patriotic Southern Democrat.
"I am a son of one of the men who stood with Robert E.
Lee Mr. Carpenter. "I have always
at the surrender," said
voted the Democratic ticket, and was an enthusiastic sup-
 ALL QUIET ON THE SOUTHERN FRONT 359

porter of Franklin D. Roosevelt both before and after the

nominating convention."
Mr. Carpenter seemed to think that all that helped.
But he too had a gun.
I didn't have a gun, and by that time the
prevailing
quiet was beginning to get on my nerves. I had only my
newspaper credentials and when I presented these to the
district attorney and to A. C. Spillings, manager for the

Chapman-Dewey plantation, whom I found in conference,

the atmosphere became distinctly chilly.
Both declined at first to be interviewed, on the ground
that their experiences with Northern newspapermen had
been unfortunate. At the moment the series on the Arkan-
sas share-croppersby F. Raymond Daniell was appearing
in the New
York Times. District Attorney Stafford asserted
that he would be glad to pay Mr. Daniell's expenses back
to Marked Tree so that he might have the opportunity to
call him a liar.

After some persuasion Mr. Spillings consented to go

over the Daniell articles with me so that I might ascertain
the ground of their objection. As far as I could make out,
the real objection was that Daniell had not only reported
the planters' statements accurately and in great detail, but
had also given space to statements made by officials of the
Southern Tenant Farmers Union. In fact the only thing
that Mr. Spillings specifically denied was that he, Spillings,
had said he would vote for acquittal if he were on a jury
trying somebody for killing an "outside agitator."
My last interview in Poinsett County was with the Rev-
erend J. Abner Sage, pastor of the Methodist church of
Marked Tree, whom the union leaders had charged with
360 HEADING HOME
helping to organize the night-riding of which their mem-
bers had been victims. Brother Sage also honored Mr.
Daniell by calling him a liar. I intimated that since he
had spiritual charge over that community, he must be dis-
tressed and concerned by the violence of recent events.
"I am
not aware of any acts of violence," said Brother
Sage. Being further pressed, he admitted that there had
been violence, but insisted that everything was quiet now.
Everything would have been quiet, except for the inter-
vention of Northern agitators.
Brother Sage did not take kindly to questioning. In the
end, this quiet, austere man of God intimated that if any
more Bolshevik newspapermen like Mr. Daniell and me
stuck our noses into the Arkansas share-cropper situation,
there wouldn't be any more quiet, but instead, plenty of
trouble. Furthermore, if I wanted trouble right now, I
could have it.

After that, I left without much delay, reflecting that a

war correspondent's job is easier, and on the whole, less

hazardous than that of reporting certain sectors of peace-

ful America, both at that moment and in any future that
I could foresee.
A few weeks later I was in Washington, prepared to tell
any interested New Deal Gideonites how the war was
going in Poinsett County. But things were pretty quiet
around the government offices. The report of Mrs. Mary
Connor Myers of the AAA spent three
legal staff, who
weeks investigating conditions in eastern Arkansas, had
been suppressed, although it is known that her findings
substantiated the charges of the union that hundreds of
 ALL QUIET ON THE SOUTHERN FRONT 361

share-croppers had been illegally evicted and cheated out

of their rightful share in the cotton acreage-reduction con-
tracts. On top of this Chester Davis had purged the legal

of the AAA by discharging Jerome Frank and others;

staff

and in a new ruling Secretary Wallace had capitulated to

the Southern planters. Clearly, the share-croppers were
out of luck, in Washington as in Poinsett County.
In the Nation for Sept. 1935, H. L. Mitchell and
18,

J. R. Butler completed this picture of

the idyllic relations
of Poinsett County's incorporated Ole Massas and their
faithful croppers as follows:

By now the offensive against us (the Southern Tenant

Farmers Union) develops new forms. In recent weeks there
has appeared a new organization, ostensibly of working
farmers, whose members wear green shirts, have a military
discipline, and flaunt as their sacred emblem the swastikal
Hitler over the plantationsl
We are now working for more adequate wages in cotton
picking. Refusing any longer to accept wages of 35 cents to

65 cents a hundred pounds, our membership has voted . . .

to strike for $1.00 a hundred. As this strike starts, terror will

again close down on the countryside.

How is I had reason to know. But in

real that terror

Memphis saw a
I queer-looking contraption of spindles
and belts which seemed potentially even more terrifying.
I talked to its inventors, the Rust brothers; also to experts
at the Delta Experiment Station and elsewhere. They con-
firmed, practically without qualification, the claims of the
inventors. One of them said: "If labor conditions were
what they were before the depression (around $1.25 a day
362 HEADING HOME
for field labor) most of the Delta planters would be using
mechanical cotton-pickers now."
With the present hand-picking method, the average
cost of harvesting the American cotton crop is $13 per
bale. It is estimated that when the Rust machine or its

equivalent generally introduced, the average cost will

is

be about one-fifth of the present cost of hand-picking (from

35 cents to 65 cents a hundred pounds). Moreover, the
mechanization of harvesting, which is the bottle neck of
the industry, would precipitate the mechanization of cot-
ton production as a whole. Bulletin No. 290 of the Delta
Experiment Station says:

Much more labor than is needed for cotton production has

been kept on most Delta plantations, primarily for the pick-
ing season. Efforts to reduce production labor have been both
feeble and futile, for the reason that the peak load comes at

picking time. Before production costs can be reduced to the

minimum the harvest problems must be solved. . . .

When mechanical picking is made possible, hand labor may

be reduced to a minimum through the use of labor-saving
machinery in all production operations. Planters will be able
to reduce their labor population at least 75 per cent.

With mechanization, the experts assured me, the Yazoo

Delta could compete successfully in the world market with
any area now in production or in prospect. Without
mechanization, with the acreage cut down and the price
of cotton pegged at 1 2 cents by government financing total-

ing $600,000,000 in March, 1935, production was shifting

to Brazil and the Argentine. There cotton is picked at 34
cents a hundred and labor is "docile."
 ALL QUIET ON THE SOUTHERN FRONT 363
In the Saturday Evening Post of Sept. 17, 1935, James
E. Edmonds estimates that by 1940 Brazil alone will be

exporting about 4,000,000 bales of cotton "just as good

and more cheaply produced," which will reduce the mar-
ket of North American cotton growers by that much. He
adds the following macabre reflection:

Four million bales of export loss in five years means the

equivalent about 400,000 cotton-producing families de-
of

prived of livelihood, cut off as customers for the goods and

products of the rest of the United States, cast back upon bare
subsistence farming in a condition of pioneer primitive exist-
ence, or thrown into competition with the producers of food
and foodstuffs in other sections. Actually it would mean that
themore than 2,000,000 families which produce cotton in the
North American South would lose from one quarter to one
third of their normal income.

The experts say that the only way the South can meet
this threat is by mechanization. In his letter endorsing
the Rust cotton-picker, W. E. Ayres, assistant director of
the Delta Experiment Station, writes: "Lincoln emanci-
pated the Southern Negro. It remains for cotton har-
vesting machinery to emancipate the Southern cotton
planter."
There hope, then, for the modern, incorporated Ole
is

Massas of the plantations. But what about the "emanci-

pated" plantation share-croppers and laborers both black
and white? Mr. Ayres has his answer to this:

Notwithstanding the objections that some have raised to

such a machine because of present unemployment, I have
maintained for ten years that it isn't
up to agriculture or to
364 HEADING HOME
cotton producers, as a class of agricultural people, to absorb
at starvation wages machine-replaced industrial labor. Print-

ers, ginners, textile manufacturers, and other industrialists are

just as much obligated to throw their labor-saving devices
into the back alley in behalf of unemployment as the cotton

producer.
In a recent talk before agricultural engineers at Memphis,
I made the statement that it would be very much more sat-

isfactory to remove the lint from the seed or do our ginning

by hand for the reason that it could be done indoors, and that
the production would not deteriorate while waiting to be
hand-picked.

It would take far too much

space to discuss the implica-
tions of this statement or to speculate on how the intro-
duction of the cotton-picker will affect the "quiet" of east-
ern Arkansas (a dozen Marked Tree planters have signed
endorsements of the Rust machine) or of the Yazoo-Missis-
sippi Delta. By the admission of one of the foremost ex-
perts of the cotton-producing region, labor is at present
getting starvation wages; South American encroachment
on the market will further reduce acreage, employment,
and wages. If to meet this competition, the picking of cot-
ton is mechanized, the labor population would be reduced
by at least 75 per cent. How, by starving the croppers and
laborers to death? Obviously, under the capitalist mode of

production, the dice are loaded against labor in either

case.

Secretary Wallace is a mystic. Doubtless the crystal ball

of the New Deal will reveal an answer, utterly satisfying,
and "constitutional."
 TVA: THE PRESIDENT'S LOVE CHILD

"T STATE you categorically that

to as a broad general
JL rule the development of public utilities should re-

main, with certain exceptions, a function of private initia-

tive and private capital."

Franklin D. Roosevelt said this in an election speech in
Portland, Oregon, in September, 1932. He added some
qualifying words about the necessity of retaining hydro-
electric resources in public hands and "giving the people
the right to operate their own power business where and
when it is them against inefficient serv-
essential to protect
ice or exorbitant charges"
the yardstick idea.
Six months after making this speech, the President and
his Brain Trust were busy serving up the mixed dishes of
sour pickles that the New Deal turned out to be. One of
these dishes was the Tennessee Valley Authority and in the
beginning, at least, it was his favorite of all the children
bred out of Harvard, the University of Chicago and other
brain centers by the President's somewhat irresponsible
economic experimentalism.
Even in its original conception, TVA didn't jibe with
Mr. Roosevelt's unexciting liberalism, as expressed in the
statement quoted above. And three years later the child
was squalling in the Tennessee wilderness, beset by a score
of injunctions, harried by the Edison Institute, the Ap-

365
366 HEADING HOME
palachian Coal Association, and the Liberty League, and
trying earnestly, in court and in Congress, to resemble
possible so that the President wouldn't
itself as little as

repudiate the consequences of his gentlemanly philander-

ing with the facts of life, as more forthright people under-
stand them.
was in Knoxville, Tennessee, when the local Chamber
I

of Commerce was in the act of adopting the child with a

touching maternal ardor. "TVA Appreciation Week" was

being celebrated with a parade of floats, bands, and a big

barbecue. Over thirty cities and towns participated in

this tribute, in which chambers of commerce, labor unions,

and farmers' organizations united in testifying that TVA
has meant much to the seven states affected by its ramified
program of navigation improvement, flood and erosion
control, electrification, reforestation and economic re-
habilitation.
At the preliminary love feast held to lay plans for this
celebration there were only two vacant chairs. The private

power companies and the coal companies were not repre-

sented, but neither did they disturb the somewhat ironical
amenities of the occasion by any forthright opposition to
Appreciation Week. Being hopelessly corrupted by the
virus of economic determinism, I was not surprised by the

benign unanimity with which Rotarians, labor union

leaders, and chambers of commerce, were cheering for
TVA. was induced, one suspected, both by the prospect
It

of cheaper electric rates if and when TVA hurdles the

legal obstructions by which it is confronted, and by the

utterly incontrovertible gospel that $48,000,000 can't be
wrong that being the amount which TVAhad spent in
 TVA: THE PRESIDENT'S LOVE CHILD 367
the area since inception. Knoxville has enjoyed a substan-
tial share of this expenditure, which has flowed into even

the smallest capillaries of the regional economy, with par-

ticular benefit, however, to the local real estate and mer-
cantile interests.
In addressing the conference of mayors called to lay
plans for Appreciation Week, Mayor J. F. O'Connor of
Knoxville summarized the basis of the city's gratitude
when he said: "Frankly, Knoxville would have been in a
bad way but for TVA. Through its help we are now well
on our way out of the depression."
Some 350 cities and towns in the seven states affected by
the development have applied for TVA power. With the
exception of Birmingham, Alabama, the major munici-
all

palities where the issue has been presented to the people

have voted to bring in TVA
power. Two years ago, Knox-
ville passed a bond issue for the construction of a mu-
nicipal distributive system. TVA
won in Memphis by a
vote of 17 to i; Chattanooga passed its bond issue by
a vote of 2 to i, in a bitterly contested election which
developed some amusing episodes.
Candles burned in the offices of the election commis-
sioners when they counted the ballots that authorized
Chattanooga to build own distributing system using
its

TVA power. Why candles, when the offices were also

lighted electrically? Because the labor unionists in the
Tennessee Valley 'are a bit cynical about the private power
interests. They bought and lighted the candles because

they feared the electric power might be cut off just when
the ballots were being counted; and they didn't trust what
368 HEADING HOME
the Moseses of the private power interests would do if the
lights went out.
As it
happened, the lights didn't go out. The Tennes-
see Electric Power Company even went so far as virtuously
to supply gas lamps for just such an emergency.
Negroes voted in that election, and the opposition to
the private power company was gross enough to intimate
that some of the $24,000 spent by the Citizens' and Tax-

payers' League, political ally of the power interests, went

to those Negroes. A
grand jury investigated this expendi-
ture and found that $20,000 of it came from a source out-
side the state. From the Commonwealth and Southern
Utility Holding Company, of which Tennessee Electric
Power is a subsidiary? The
opposition newspapers in-
timated as much. In any case, the Negroes possibly rea-
soned that there were no jobs in sight even if they did
vote against the bond issue, whereas cheap lighting would
be in prospect if
they voted for it.
By a pure coincidence,
it is
reported that the local Negro boss lost his job shortly
after the election.
One of the colored people who voted for TVA power
was Georgia, cook in the family of Adolph S. Ochs, pub-
lisher of the Chattanooga Times, and ardent supporter of
the private power interests. When Georgia announced her
intention, Mr. Ochs was terribly hurt. He circulated a six-
page letter to hundreds of his friends, pointing out that
Georgia's vote would cancel his obviously a sheer out-
rage; also other colored cooks might be laughing darkly
and plotting similar disloyalty. The letter was printed.
It proved to be a political boomerang. Georgia became a

popular heroine and was offered scores of jobs in case it

 TVA: THE PRESIDENT'S LOVE CHILD 369

happened she should be asked to leave the service of Mr.

Ochs, which for understandable reasons didn't happen.
It may be gathered from these incidents, first, that

Southern politics is both humorous and rowdy, and sec-

ond, that for the past two years the fight of the Valley
people to use the power which the Federal government
is
putting at their disposal has been in the foreground
of politics. Both things are true; it is also true that labor,
for excellent reasons, has played a leading role in this

fight.
Before the NRA codes went into effect, furniture fac-
tories in the Valley were paying as low as 41/2 cents an
hour for a 65-hour week. But TVA started operations al-
most simultaneously with NRA, and TVA has meant far
more to labor in the Valley than NRA meant during its
brief and ineffectual span. The wage scale paid during the

depression on Norris Dam is roughly two or three times

as high as that paid by private power utilities and private
contractors to labor used on dams built for the most part
during the New Era. TVA labor in the Knoxville area is
paid from 45 cents an hour for common labor to $1.50 an
hour for cable-way operators, and similar scales prevail on
other TVA projects. In March the total personnel of TVA
was 13,495 and the total pay roll was $1,283,052.
Inevitably, this expenditure made a considerable im-
pact upon the labor situation in the Valley, where the
prevailing wage last spring ran from 30 cents an hour for
common labor in Knoxville to 15 cents and less in areas
remote from the TVA influences. Moreover, the TVA
labor policy, as directed by Glair C. Killen, formerly inter-
national representative for the International Brotherhood
370 HEADING HOME
of Electrical Workers, has consistently favored unioniza-
tion, directly with respect to TVA workers and indirectly
with respect to the effect of this policy on the activities
of union organizers in the Valley.
TVA labor is organized in a Works Council, which is

not a company union, but a vertical structure made up of

horizontal segments of existing craft unions. The TVA
labor relations director is not a member of this council,
which is run by committees of workers.
There is
impressive evidence that this liberal labor
policy has been notably successful from the purely practi-
cal point of view of getting the job done. On private con-
struction jobs the average labor turnover is 25 per cent a
month. For TVA labor it has dropped to one-half of i
per cent a month.
This striking gain in continuity of employment has
undoubtedly contributed to the efficiency with which the
Dam construction has gone forward. Norris Dam will be
completed in two and a half years as against the army's
original estimate of four years. Ross White, superintendent
of construction, told me that the efficiency of the
Tennessee mountaineer and "poor white" labor employed
on the Dam, much of which required preliminary train-
ing, has proved to be only slightly less than might have
been expected if he had had his pick of the trained con-
struction workers of the country. Incidentally, much of
this labor had not only to be trained, but fed before it
could be used. The laborers on the Dam averaged, when
they began, 25 per cent underweight. They were thin-
bellied men, fed on corn pone and sow belly, not the husky
construction workers to whom Mr. White was accustomed.
 TVA: THE PRESIDENT'S LOVE CHILD 371

Yet decent diet and decent housing soon overcame this

deficiency by at least one-half.

About a hundred of the workers on the Dam were
brought over from the mining town of Wilder, Tennessee,
after the bloody collapse of a strike in 1933, in which

eighteen men lost their lives. These starving, locked-out

union refugees from one of the worst industrial rat-holes
in America are now rated among the most efficient workers
on the Dam.
In Wilder, where the children are still singing ballads

commemorating the union martyrs of the last strike,

I heard stories that would sound incredible to the ears of

people who live in communities where life is at least a

little better.For example, does Norman Thomas know
that when he spoke there during the strike, the only rea-
son his meeting wasn't shot up was that the union men
held the hills that day and trained a dozen high-powered
rifles on the speakers' platform?
TVA gave those locked-out miners jobs. TVA raised
both the wage scale and the conditions of labor. TVA,
in the person of Chairman A. E. Morgan, stood for civil

liberty and offered Socialist speakers a hall at Norris when

the League for Industrial Democracy was run out of Knox-
ville. Largely because of the proximity of TVA, the Amal-

gamated Clothing Workers have been able to organize

nearly 85 per cent of the clothing workers in the Knox-

ville area, while other unions have made equally notable
progress.

Unquestionably it was the labor policies of TVA,

scarcely less than its threat to the profits of power and
372 HEADING HOME
coal companies, that sharpened the bitterness of the oppo-
sition. This becomes apparent in the court record of the
United Court of Appeals, where
States Circuit suc- TVA
cessfully appealed the adverse decision handed down by
Judge Grubb in the Ashwander case. Hardier readers are
urged to peruse this fascinating i,2OO-page document, in
which the genealogy of the TVA project is traced back as
far as 1824, when President Monroe initiated the first
of a series of unsuccessful attempts to build canals around
Muscle Shoals. In it we find Chairman A. E. Morgan con-

tending that "we are trying to find out how to take this

wreckage of rugged individualism and make an orderly

economy out of it."
To which the attorneys representing the private power
interests that inspired the Ashwander suit reply: "The in-
terpretation of the act as contended by the TVA would
give it the full
power of a business corporation acting
within charter powers, to create 25 billion annual KWH
primary capacity potential in these projects, and enter
into, subsidize or promote any business whatever to find
a market for this power; in short, unlimited power to
dominate and reform the lives and destinies of the people
of the area through domination of their industry."
In other words, the power interests object to TVA's exer-
cising power from asocial point of view which monopoly

capitalism, with the strategic control lodged in the public

utility holding companies, was exercising in the Tennes-
see Valley ruggedly and anti-socially before the birth of
the President's love-child. Specifically, we find the power
interests objecting to TVA's attempt to control land specu-
lation of the Grand Coulee kind. On page 36 of the tran-
 TVA: THE PRESIDENT'S LOVE CHILD 373

script the power interests contend that TVA's attempt to

cut the price of overflow lands from $91.30 an acre to
$29.67 per acre is an attempt "to overreach the owners
of overflow lands" and hence, "contrary to good morals."
Inferentially, the operations of real estate racketeers who
unloaded Muscle Shoals lots on get-rich-quick suckers
from coast to coast, were examples of "good morals."
On page 53 the "complainants aver that . . . the pro-

gram of TVA is in substance and intent a long-range pro-

gram." On page 66 they contend that "the use of federal
funds for any such long-range purpose is a misuse of such
funds." On page 75 we note that "TVA confuses and de-
moralizes the economic pattern" as if that eroded, ex-

ploited, poverty-stricken region had been, prior to TVA,

a rugged little paradise.
By this time it is apparent that the TVA is indeed a
wunderkind. "It is a deliberate turning toward the future,
a commitment to an ideal," orated Professor Rexford G.
Tugwell. "Its success can depopulate cities, destroy a thou-
sand entrenched privileges, invalidate a whole tradition of
simple-hearted self-interest."
Compare this with the President's mild and carefully
hedged commitment in the speech already quoted, and his
embarrassment becomes understandable. Perhaps it is un-
fair to credit him with the paternity of the TVA baby.
What happened was that the original powers granted
to the Tennessee Valley Authority, confirmed and some-
what extended by the last session of Congress, were such
as to make conceivable, at least, a genuine enterprise of
planning, in so far as planning is possible within the limi-
tations of the capitalist economy.
374 HEADING HOME
Thegoverning triumvirate Arthur E. Morgan, David
Lilienthal, and Harcourt Morgan happened to be honest
and able people. They assembled an exceptionally able
staff and attempted in all earnestness to find "a way out
of industrial chaos into a designed social and industrial
order." They appealed "to the electrical industry . . .

to show statesmanship" so that "this unplanned and unreg-

ulated condition should give place to an economic pro-
gram based on foresight and planning, with clear recog-
nition of the right of all well-meaning persons for a chance
to work out their lives without exploitation or unneces-

sary obstacle."
They appealed in vain, of course. The nature of the
thing they appealed to becomes painfully apparent in the
court record. Business, particularly monopoly capitalism
as represented by the private power interests directly
animal whose vision, like
affected, is a one-eyed acquisitive
that of a locomotive headlight, covers a narrow strip of

territory directly in front of it.

All across the continent I had seen how the withering
glare of that headlight had stripped the forests, gutted
and wasted the mineral resources, piled speculation on
speculation and left in its wake a chaos of eroded and
burned-over landscapes, ghost towns, and economic, social
and moral collapse. Here in the Tennessee Valley this one-
eyed animal had encountered the child of the President's
day dream of "planning." For a moment it paused in con-
sternation; then it gathered steam and proceeded to grind
this perverse idealistic creature under the wheels of busi-
ness necessity, which is not the necessity of order, of plan-

ning, but the necessity of profit. It appealed over the

 TVA: THE PRESIDENT'S LOVE CHILD 375

heads of the President and Congress to the law, to the

Constitution. It pointed out that "the United States is a
government of enumerated powers, conferred in express
terms or by necessary implication in it by the Constitu-
tion."
What this one-eyed animal really thinks and feels be-
comes again and again implicit in the statement of its
case against TVA. It represents the governing class. It
considers government to be an instrument for the achieve-
ment ofends, which are private profit. It enjoys special
its

privileges, 'but admits no entailed responsibilities. Yes,

government limits the freedom of those governed those
not included in the governing class. The governing class,

the property-owning, privilege-holding class, is

exempt
from these limitations.
This, in effect, will be the thesis which the power in-
terests will defend in the final appeal of the Ashwander
case to the Supreme Court.

Harcourt Morgan is not a business man, but a man of

science, in fact one of the ablest men in his field. In a
socialized America he would almost inevitably be a mem-
ber of the central planning commission, not because he
has socialistic views if he holds such views he has not,
so far as I know, expressed them but because his whole
life has been devoted to planning, and he has accomplished

a good deal, in spite of the limitations of the social order

in which he is bound.
Dr. Morgan is the erosion expert of the TVA trium-
virate. What he is doing, he insisted, is nothing new and
revolutionary in the political sense of the word. It started
376 HEADING HOME
as far back as 1862, when, in the middle of the Civil War,
Governor Morrell put through Congress the Land Grant
College Act, which laid the foundation of our whole sys-
tem of agricultural colleges, agricultural experiment sta-
tions, Federal and State agricultural departments, and

county agricultural agents, with their complex interrela-

tions.
"What Morrell saw," said Dr. Morgan, "was that the
soil of the South was being mined for cotton; that the
dominance of the production, fabrication and exportation
of cotton in the national economy, coupled with the meth-
ods of agriculture then employed, entailed a progressive
destruction of the physiographic base; a fatal violation of
the plant, animal, and human life without which no coun-

try can support its population. Morrell saw the danger

of erosion, which if not checked must ultimately make
of America another China. He saw most of the problems
and envisaged some of the solutions. But best of all, he
gave us, in the land grant colleges, and the long succession
of research men and field workers which they have turned

out, the means by which we in America, if we act in time,

may yet avert the destruction of our natural heritage."

One of the problems was the introduction of cattle into
the South. That entailed the conquest of the cattle tick.
On this problem Harcourt Morgan and his associates spent
many years, studying the life cycle of the tick and finally
hitting upon the method of extermination, which, as dis-
seminated by the land grant colleges and the county
agents, has moved
the cattle quarantine line from Mason
and Dixon's line to the Rio Grande, and stopped annual
losses of hundreds of millions.
 TVA: THE PRESIDENT'S LOVE CHILD 377

But was only the beginning of the attack on the

this
fundamental problem of erosion. As animal husbandry
was restored in the South, the cattle not only helped to re-
fertilize the soil, but could be fed cover crops of legumes,

alfalfa, vetches, which served the dual purpose of provid-

ing a vegetable cover for the thus reducing erosion,

soil,

and of extracting nitrogen from the air and returning it

to the soil. That made every farm a nitrogen plant, with
a combined production vastly exceeding that of the gov-
ernment nitrate plant at Muscle Shoals.
TVA, in fulfilling the terms of its mandate, is maintain-

ing the nitrate plant in a stand-by condition for war emer-

gencies. But because of the greatly cheapened commercial
production of nitrates, nitrogen is no longer the chief
deficiency in the agricultural economy. It is phosphates,
necessary to produce plant fiber, and ultimately animal
and human bones.
That is why the TVA research staff at Muscle Shoals is
concentrating on the problem of producing cheaper phos-
phates. There are rich phosphate beds in the Tennessee
Valley, in New Mexico, and elsewhere. But the require-
ment is to devise a process that will make the abundant
low-grade ores available; also to produce higher concen-
trates.

With this objective TVA has set up two electric furnaces

and two blast furnaces, using dump power from Muscle
Shoals. Already some impressive results have been ob-
tained; a 52 per cent concentrate, perhaps the highest
yet achieved; also phosphate and lime combinations,
which are tried out through the cooperation of the county
378 HEADING HOME
agents and the farmers themselves, on the erosion-impov-
erished farms of the Valley.
"TVA not just a yardstick for the production and
is

distribution of electricity," declared Mr. Morgan. "Navi-

gation, flood control, the checking of erosion, the restora-

tion of the soil fertility, the generation of power they are
all integral parts of what happens to be a magnificent nat-
ural laboratory for the study and solution of crucial prob-
lems. These problems are national, not regional. What
we are doing here is done for the country as a whole. And
upon the successful completion of this work, more may
depend than even we who are engaged in it can at present
imagine."
This is scarcely the language or the vision of the one-
eyed capitalist acquisitor. What Dr. Morgan envisages is,
of course, a long-range program. Business neither would
nor could undertake such a program, crucial though it
certainly is. Nor canbusiness accept the solutions of the

problems on which Dr. Morgan is engaged, for they are

bound to be social solutions, not capitalist-acquisitive
solutions.
It seems probable that TVA's major achievement will
be to demonstrate that capitalism cannot plan. But it will
also demonstrate both the possibilities of planning and
the necessity of planning. It istherefore exactly what the

power interests suppose it to be: a definite threat to the

whole theory and practice of planless acquisition under
capitalism. So that in contemplating this love-child one
is obliged to acknowledge that the President has had his

moments, even if he didn't really mean them.

 WHAT TIME IS IT?

Joshua saw the wheel

Way in the middle of the air;
The little wheel run by faith,
The big wheel run by the will of God.
Wheel in a wheel,
The little wheel run by faith,
The big wheel run by the will of God,
Way in the middle of the air.
When I drove through the Yazoo Delta I heard the ne-
groes singing this spiritual. They sat beside the creeks and
roadside ditches, fished, and sang.
What time do they think it is in America they who
have never shared the American dream of Where Life is
Better, they who have lived for nearly two centuries in
the bleak darkness of economic and spiritual subjection?
Several times I stopped along the road and attempted
to ask them. But they didn't know, and if they had,

they wouldn't have told me anything they are rightly sus-

picious of white men.
I suspect that no one knows. Certainly I am in no posi-

tion to make any categorical pronouncements. America is

huge in seven months of travel I had seen only a fraction

of it, and that too hurriedly.
Is America facing the barricades as the professional pur-

379
380 HEADING HOME
veyors of red scares like to declaim? If the barricades be
taken as the symbol of civil war, the answer is no, not in
any future that can at present be envisaged. Our domestic
situation is that of a
progressively deteriorating social and
economic anarchy, with a definite drift toward fascism.
Civil war can scarcely occur until the present recovery
movement, based on government spending, has dissipated
itself, until the post-dated checks which President Roose-
velt has issued against the crisis come due, until our vari-
ous regional vigilante and quasi-fascist groups become
merged and coordinated under the aegis of big business.
It is possible that the pressure of the unemployed and

of militant rank and file labor movements will be just

strong enough to organize the reaction but not strong

enough to stage an effective battle on either the economic
or political front. To recognize this possibility implies no
attitude of defeatism or impotence. There are other possi-
bilities, but they can only be achieved by realistic struggle.
There is the possibility that, after the clear demonstration
that capitalism cannot plan, cannot release the forces of

production, cannot finance consumption, there will come

a fundamental change in our social psychology. At some

point just where and when I don't know the American

dream of freedom, of opportunity, of democracy, of justice
as things actual or possible within the framework of the

capitalist economy, will be definitely discarded by the

masses of the industrial and agricultural workers. The
break, I suspect, will come rather suddenly when it comes,
and the factors making for such a break are steadily accu-

mulating.
For one thing, the dream-making apparatus, while still
 WHAT TIME Is IT? 381

substantially intact, is being progressively deflated during

the present period of capitalist decline. Being operated
for profit, this apparatus cannot function with respect to
our large and apparently permanent category of "extra-
economic" men and women. It has long been true that
the very poor have nopress. Being primarily advertising
businesses, our newspapers and magazines must concen-
trate on those who have money to buy something except
bare necessities. The movies, too, must "trade up," permit-
ting the underlying population to dream their own dreams
without benefit of Hollywood. Even the radio does not
penetrate effectively into these darker strata. The share-
croppers and agricultural laborers of the south and south-
west can't afford radios; this is also true of the unemployed
and semi-employed urban slums.
in the
On the other hand, no counter-apparatus has been
erected. We don't have even an equivalent for the old

"Appeal to Reason," with its half million circulation. Our

radicals and revolutionaries and this goes for all parties
and factions have not yet geared themselves effectively to
the task of enlightening and moving the American masses.
Yet there are hopeful signs too: the current civil war in
the American Federation of Labor, with the odds ulti-
mately in favor of a conversion to industrial unionism and
a consequent strengthening of labor militancy; the growth
since the depression of the cooperative movement which
now has 1,600,000 affiliated members and over a score of
publications; the development of consumer cooperation,
until recently chiefly a rural phenomenon in America, as
an arm of the labor movement. Such a development is
382 HEADING HOME
possibly foreshadowed by the forthright pro-labor program
of such organizations as Cooperative Distributors.
Meanwhile we face, in an unpredictable time perspec-
the menace of war. Many informed observers believe
tive,
that a three, or at most, a five year postponement of the

European debacle is the best that can be hoped for.

Moscow, in pursuing its basic Socialism-in-one-country

policy, is
busy underwrite the European status
trying to
quo both through the League of Nations and through its
Communist sections in all the countries in-
control of the
volvedthe French Front Populaire being the frankest and
most effective instrument of this policy.
America leans at the moment toward isolation. It was
an unmistakable popular ground swell that forced through
the neutrality resolution, against the will of the President
and the State Department. Both desired a permissive enact-
ment enabling them to play the dangerous game of defin-
ing the aggressor and employing sanctions to underwrite
the status quo. The President's later action in extending
the scope of the neutrality resolution may be taken to
mean that he felt and responded to the popular demand
for an isolationist policy; Mr. Roosevelt may be a navalist,
but he is certainly a politician, first and foremost.
However, it seems clear that neutrality resolutions, how-
ever extended and implemented, can be only a stop gap.
The European status quo is bound to be shaken, no matter
what bargain Britain and France strike with Mussolini.
The next war, wherever and however it is ultimately
launched (not until Germany is ready to attack), seems
certain to involve Russia, Japan, and Great Britain in the
Far East. With America still
capitalist and possibly in the
 WHAT TIME Is IT? 383

grip of a renewed crisis, we shall be exhorted to help

Great Britain and Russia rescue China, or rather Ameri-
can imperialist interests in China, from Japanese imperial-
ism. As already pointed out, it will be easy to recruit our

unemployed for such a war.

Wheel in a wheel. To travel over America is to see these

wheels grinding faster and faster; to know that they can-
not be reversed or stopped; to be shaken and terrified
again and again by contemplating what their grist may be.
Certainly in the days to come, there can be no escape, no
peace, no neutrality for anybody.
Life can be made better in America. Indeed, America
can be made quite magnificent. But not by those who
dream dead dreams, who plead exemption from struggle
on one ground or another, who cry for peace but will not
its
pay price. . . .

How childish are all such pleas! Only when we have

ceased to make them can we claim that as a people we have
come of age and are worthy to challenge fate.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BESIDES the general acknowledgment of help already made, my

especial thanks are due first of all to my wife, Winifred Raush-
enbush, for help in the analysis of documents and for many
valuable criticisms and suggestions; to Elliot M. Cohen, who in
preparing the manuscript for the press contributed much in the
way of stimulus and correction; to G. Hartley Grattan, Louis
Hacker, and Sidney Hook, who read parts of the manuscript;
to Louis Breier and Charles Malemuth, who companioned me
on parts of journey; to Katharine Seymour, traveler ex-
my
traordinary, who helped me to understand some of the things
I saw; also to the New York Post, Philadelphia Record, Cam-

den Courier and Journal, Bridgeport Herald, Nation, Com-

mon Sense, Forum, Harper's, Advance, American Spectator,
Consumer Defender, and Modern Monthly, where some of the
material in this book was first published.